"God loves children," most parents tell their offspring. It is always a good thing to bring up God fearing children.

But for the 30,000 children that Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) sold in Darfur as slaves, what can you tell them about Jesus? Dr Stephen Kagoda, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Internal Affairs,4 was reported telling the Parliamentary Defence Committee, "Some of these children are in Darfur being used as child soldiers, porters, and others sold as sex slaves to the Sudanese."

What about the children who sleep on the streets and those sexually and physically abused by the people they once held as dear? Jesus' ministry, one can argue, was not about winning over children. In fact, the gospel cites very few verses in which Jesus was engaged in ministering to children.

In what came to be a signature statement, Jesus said, "Let the little ones come to me, and stop keeping them away, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to people like these." Indeed, the future of any kingdom is the children, yet more than any part of the country; children in northern Uganda have suffered silently the atrocities of war, and many others have ended up as commanders of the brutal rebel faction, the Lord's Resistance Army of Joseph Kony.

Though David Lubaale, the director of Every Child Ministries, a Christian organisation that rescues child slaves and provides abandoned and needy children with rehabilitation, training and teaching materials, said that he was hopeful that some of these children would one day find themselves home, it will be at a cost. "The world has betrayed the innocent trust of children," Lubaale says, "and it takes a whole community to help restore this trust."

Lubaale could not have been wrong, given the fact he has worked with children and youth for a long period of time, first with the UN and now as his organisation's coordinator of Uganda and Sudan for his. He has been behind the ministry's rehabilitation of children through providing them with opportunities to return to school, in addition to Sunday schools and youth ministries that offer Bible teaching.

Lubaale, who holds a Masters in Crisis Management and Conflict Resolution from Daystar Christian University in Nairobi Kenya, told me that children who have not known love but cruelty from the world are unlikely to take the gospel with an open heart unless they seek love in action. So, for the children who until today bear the scars of war, telling them about Jesus' love and promise of a better future sounds a far distant dream.

For 20 years, northern Uganda has been one of the most dangerous places in the country for children and Lubaale, who traverses the region providing day to day needs to children, has learnt a valuable lesson that: time, energy and resources invested in these children is a sign that God still loves them, irrespective of what they are going through.

When Every Child Ministries gave away scholastic materials to candidates in Gulu and Amuru Districts, one of the beneficiaries, Robert Oloyi, a P.7 candidate at Gulu Public school said, "It's a blessing to receive such items that had complicated our good performance and indeed it has raised our hope for excellence."

His expression has a far reaching outcry as there are a number of Oloyi's colleagues living on the streets, bearing the chilling cold, feeling the pangs of hunger, and living like unwanted people in their society since some of them lost their homes, parents and any other thing that would give them a sense of belonging.

Children are the future of every society - and deprived them of the future they hope for is one way of robbing them of their belief in the goodness of humanity and the purpose for which God created us.

As for the suffering children, it is important that society put on the attitude of "I'm my brother's (sister's) keeper." And it is high time we demanded the release of child slaves and eventually call for the end of the suffering of children, because Jesus still tells us, "Let the little ones come to me, and stop keeping them away, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to people like these." What's your role?