This image was featured last week at Business Insider, part of a photo-collection titled “This Is What Millions Of Young People In China And India REALLY Think.” And what they “REALLY think”, for the most part, is rather disconcerting.
 
Understandably, those living in poverty, merely express hope for a better life. But those who already have a “better life”, seem to be yearning for a deeper meaning to that life, something that really matters – significance beyond materialism.

“Now days many young people do not care about the development of China and the world. They only care about themselves and ignore other people and things around them.”
~ Jia Jia, (25) Guangxi Province.

 
As if to underscore that sentiment, comes this tragic tale from China’s Guangdong Province last week: Chinese toddler run over twice after being left on street.
The 2 year-old girl was hit by a small van in the narrow lane of a busy marketplace;

The driver pauses, and then pulls away, crushing the child for a second time under his rear wheels.
 
It is not the accident itself, but what happens next — or rather doesn’t happen – that has left millions of ordinary Chinese wondering where their country is heading.
 
One by one, no fewer than 18 passers-by are seen on closed circuit television ignoring the girl as she lies, clearly visible in the road, hemorrhaging into the gutter. Not a single one of them stops to help.

 
Unbelievable!
Are they afraid to help? As the article suggests at one point –

“They didn’t ignore the girl, they just didn’t dare help her,” said one comment among many that said that Chinese law had helped create a fear of intervening.

 
Are they so calloused to the suffering of their fellow human beings that they merely look the other way?
Or is a large part of China’s population truly “lost” as the girl’s poster claims of her generation?
Whatever the explanation, the ill-effects of communism on a society are glaringly apparent.

But there are some bright spots. In the last several decades, despite ongoing persecution, the house church movement (protestant Christianity) in China has been spreading rapidly.
 
And there’s the uplifting story of one young woman who found both hope and a meaningful life – in Jesus Christ: Battling against a massive evil.
 
Chai Ling was the commander-in-chief of the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the violent military response to the democracy demonstrations, she went into hiding. Escaping China, she was finally able to make her way to America, earned business degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and launched a successful business; quite an accomplishment!
 
But it wasn’t until 2009, when Chai Ling became a Christian, that her heart was fulfilled. And that was when she launched a ministry called All Girls Allowed. The organization’s mission is to restore life, value, and dignity to girls and mothers, and to reveal the injustice of China’s One-Child Policy:

“Each day there are over 35,000 forced and coerced abortions,” she says. “Every day there are 500 women who commit suicide and a million baby girls abandoned into the streets. Few of them make it into the orphanage systems.”

All Girls Allowed is motivated by the love of Jesus Christ, who—by serving the least of us—set us an example that we should do as he has done for us. We draw inspiration from Jesus’ countercultural concern and affection for women and children, and we hope likewise to restore to them the life, value and dignity that they deserve as fellow image-bearers of God.

If the “lost” would only look in the right place, they too would find the hope, meaning and fulfillment they so poignantly wish for.
 

 
William Penn (1644-1718), founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, was born in London on October 14th, 1644. He entered Oxford University at age 16 and while there, rejected Anglicanism and began attending unauthorized Quaker prayer meetings. Moved by that experience, his heart was changed and he determined to devote his life to the spread of Christianity.*
 
Penn’s “religious nonconformity” resulted in his expulsion from Oxford, after which, his father sent him to a Protestant college in France, to complete his education. In his early twenties he spent a year in the Tower of London for writing a book attacking Trinitarian doctrines.
 
Thereafter, and until he left for the New World, he was regularly in trouble with the authorities and frequently imprisoned for his outspoken Christian views. His family was not thrilled. But these trials didn’t seem to faze him; he made productive use of his prison time, continuing with his theological writing.
 
Penn’s father was Admiral Sir William Penn. Upon his death in 1670, the Duke of York (future King Charles II) owed him huge sum of money. Unable to come up with the cash, he awarded a huge land grant (including present-day Pennsylvania and New Jersey) in America, to William as heir. Penn was made absolute proprietor of the territory and arrived in the New World in 1682. He named the land Pennsylvania, which means “Penn’s woods,” after his father.
 
Penn set out to make the province a haven for all persecuted denominations including, Quakers, Mennonites, Lutherans, Church of the Brethren and Moravians.* Guided by the commandment to “love thy neighbor,” he dealt fairly with the native Indians, earning their friendship and allegiance. Because men and women were equal in God’s sight, he insisted that women deserved equal rights with men. He believed in a “divine right of government” and sought to form the government of Pennsylvania as a “holy experiment” in governing.*
 
Borrowing from his friend John Locke’s philosophy, he set forth the governing structure for Pennsylvania in his “Frame of Government of Pennsylvania,” considered by many to be ahead of its time. Thomas Jefferson called Penn “the greatest law-giver the world has produced.”
 
From Wikipedia:

After Penn’s death, many of his legal and political innovations took root. His “Frame of Government” and his other ideas were later studied by Benjamin Franklin as well as the pamphleteer of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, whose father was a Quaker. Among Penn’s legacies was the unwillingness to force a Quaker majority upon Pennsylvania, allowing his state to develop into a successful “melting pot”. In addition, Thomas Jefferson and the founding Fathers adapted Penn’s theory of an amendable constitution and his vision that “all men are equal under God” in forming the federal government following the American Revolution.
 
Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love”, along with other towns in Pennsylvania, was designed by Penn with a grid pattern of streets, buildings, and public squares to promote health and fire safety. Following his death, Philadelphia continued to thrive, becoming one of the most populous colonial cities in the British Empire, reaching about 30,000 by the American Revolution, and becoming a center of commerce, science, medicine, and politics.

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All told, the life and legacy of William Penn puts a huge lie to the Left’s revisionist claim that America was not founded by Christians – on biblical principles. Penn’s achievements were all the result of acting on his Christian worldview, following God’s word. With his faith to guide him, he demonstrated how people from different races and religions can live together in peace and prosperity.
 

 
*Source: Character for Life by Don Hawkinson ~ 37 profiles of faith-inspired men and women