So if I understand you logic the pilots who I flew with in Vietnam when were all in our 20's, who now have their names on the wall should be grateful that they didn't have to live a long life and grow old like me and wake up with the malady's of old age....or is there an age limit...to be spared that suffering thing?
First let me ask if you hold this world to be a better place than heaven?
You ask me about a 20 year old, not a child. At a certain point in life a person becomes accountable before God. I would guess that a 20 year old pilot is old enough to have chosen or rejected Christ as their Lord and savior long before they were shot down over Vietnam.
Even if he did not, he was old enough to have understood good or evil, and thus be accountable to God for his choices in life. It is not a tragedy to die young if they knew Christ. What is a tragedy, is to live a full long life and never know Christ. Than they will be lost for eternity.
Think about that.. Eternity is a very, very, very long time. Even if you live to be 120, that is a very, very, very short time. We speak in terms of men, but we must understand things in the eyes of an everlasting eternal God.
However, my quote you took was for children who have yet to even understand what good or evil is when they had died. As a rule, children to young to be accountable are spared a long life of may miseries and instead get a pass to go straight to heaven. (as a rule, I am sure there are exceptions, but only God knows what those exceptions would be.)
I often times wish I could have been saved the grief of my many years of life in this world, and instead been granted a free pass to eternity without the pain I have suffered.