It's 11:00 Do you know where your children are???

A seventeen-year-old young man in Columbus, Ohio, told his mother that he was going to sell tennis shoes. He got in a car with some of his friends and waved goodbye. That evening, he did not come home.

 

After his distraught young mother cried, pleading for information on his whereabouts every day on television, after the police and the whole community searched for him, after being missing for nearly two weeks, his decomposed body was found in the woods. Apparently, he told his mother he was going to sell tennis shoes when in fact he had gone to buy a gun. The deal went south. He ended up shot and killed by another teen who he knew.

 

It was while preparing to preach the funeral of this murdered teenager and lamenting the constant and senseless rise of violence and murders in the once calm almost country cow town of Columbus, OH that his pastor, Dr. C. Dexter Wise III remembered something from his own youth. Dr. Wise grew up in the projects of Baltimore, MD which at the time, was considered the murder capital of America. It came to him that every night in his hometown, at eleven o’clock, just before the WJZ late-night news, there was a tone on the television and then a voice would say: “Parents, it’s eleven o’clock, do you know where your children are?” Then, the news would proceed.

 

For some parents this was taken as an insult or an intrusion of “Big Brother” into their private lives. What right did anyone have to question them on the location of their children? It was really none of their business. For others, it was an unnecessary notification because they always knew exactly where their children were at eleven o’clock. They were upstairs in bed. For others, it was salt in their open wounds because it reminded them that their child was fighting for her life in an ICU, lost on the city streets, behind bars in jail or dead and buried in a cemetery.

 

For most, however, it was a sign that someone cared. It was a daily house check, a reality check, and a collective community check on our children.

 

The mother of that seventeen-year-old young man was told that he was going to buy tennis shoes but that is not what he was doing or where we had gone. This is by no means to blame or judge her for the choices her son had made. Nor is it to blame or condemn him for the choice he made. How many of us did not tell the whole truth to our parents about where we were going and what we were intending to do there?

 

It is, however, a chance “to go old school” and call our attention to the fact that in so many ways we do not know where our children are. That is why Dr. Wise is asking and challenging us as a community, indeed, as a country to regularly ask ourselves like clockwork: “Do you know where you children are?” The answer to this question could be a matter of life or death.