It is a hot summer night, hot but not sticky, when the dream begins. As I drift off to sleep, the suburbs and highways of the GTA fade until I am standing in the waving grasses by a South Dakota interstate, with the sky stretching uninterrupted as far as I can see. The interstate dips a little in one spot, and in the dip there is a town. Or should it be called a village? It’s definitely a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spot.  
  Bordering a scarred dirt road cluster little box houses. On first glance I think they are abandoned, because of the disrepair and overgrown yards. My first clue is the dogs. Mangy dogs I would have tagged as strays lounge in whatever shade they can find, panting softly in the heat. Then a child slips out of a ripped screen door and flits off somewhere, so quick I wonder if I’ve just imagined her. My feet follow the path she’s taken until I hear the sound of a child’s bike.  

There’s plenty of doubt to be found. On the day He rose from the dead, leaving behind the empty tomb, doubt filled the minds of some of His disciples. Luke, who carefully investigated these events, tells of their response to the women’s tale. The rock was rolled away. Angels brought their light to that scene. “Remember how He told you . . .  that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise?” (Luke 24:6,7). The women ran to tell the disciples. What was their response to the resurrection message relayed by the women? Their words seemed an idle tale. We read of their doubt in Luke 24:11, “. . . and they did not believe them.”
  The next scene finds two followers of Jesus walking the few miles to Emmaus. Cleopas and friend were informing the stranger who had joined them of the recent sad events in Jerusalem.  Their sadness pervaded the disillusion they experienced.  “. . . We had hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 26: 21).  “Had hoped . . . . ” The joy they experienced when they came to believe contrasts so wonderfully with the somber sadness of doubt.

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In 1979, just after Mao’s cultural revolution in China, Stephen Mosher, then a Stanford University doctoral student, was conducting anthropological research in the rural Chinese province of Guandong. One day he was cycling in the small village of Guishou when he spotted a wooden crate which appeared, from a distance, to be filled with skinned cats or dogs stashed behind a crumbling building in the town. What he saw intrigued him as an anthropologist and he was determined to investigate. As he approached the crate he realized that what he had come upon was not the storage place for products that would later be sold as meat in the village market but a grizzly discovery of tiny human remains. In the crate were the bodies of dozens of unborn or newly born babies. Most of them were tiny girls.
  His shock at this discovery was to shape the course of Mosher’s life. He started his investigations as an anthropologist. At that time, no one in the western world, including Steven Mosher, was aware of the new Chinese “one-child policy.”