I have been avoiding writing and sharing my adventures in Mexico City, as every time I started to write about the beauty I saw, the fun adventures I experienced, my attempts at speaking Spanish, the delicious new foods I tried, or the wonderful friends I enjoyed adventuring with, I was also reminded of the history I saw and the pain I felt in seeing the same horror continuing today.

While my trip was almost entirely full of joyful experiences, I was brought to tears before a child’s skull. A young life ended in a barbaric sacrifice. Walking through the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, I prayed more for souls than I ever care to again. I could not stop repeatedly praying for the lives lost and those who took them. It was heartbreaking to see the broken human remains and the altars on which so many lives were horrifically taken.

The museum contained thousands of artifacts and an incredible amount of historical information, and despite being the most impressive and largest museum I have ever been to, the most memorable part was not an intriguing piece of art or heroic tale I read about. The most memorable part of visiting the museum was a part of a body of an unnamed child.

I left the museum thinking about how little we have advanced in our societal morality. We have technology, widespread education, medical advancements that were not even imaginable two hundred years ago, yet we are still sacrificing children.

The child I saw had been brutally murdered with the intention of pleasing false gods and preserving the killers’ own lives through maintaining a balanced nature. These and no reasons are justifications for killing a child. Yet, today we sacrifice children as collateral damage or as the means to cripple a society during war, so we can have more power, more land, or more money. Today we sacrifice children, so that man, and woman, won’t be inconvenienced or burdened by their tiny hands. Today we still murder the innocent, so the guilty can go on ‘living.’

No child’s skull, picture, or ultrasound, should be in a museum one day because we decided they were worth ‘sacrificing’ today.

Speak up, vote, and pray for life.

J.M.J.