Consider Renee & Danny (not their real names), an 8-year-old girl and her 6-year-old brother, two kids in our apartment complex neighborhood. They began playing with our kids this summer while the local public schools were on vacation. We quickly established, in response to their insistent questions, that:
They greeted each of these discoveries with poorly-disguised astonishment.
Renee and Danny may have different biological fathers; they have another "father" who has divorced their mother, has remarried, and whose step-daughters socially torture Renee when she visits them; they have another "father", or "he will be soon!", who is their mother's current live-in boyfriend.
Renee, who is in third grade at the local public school, can barely read and is a habitual liar. She doesn't lie maliciously, because she literally doesn't know better. As far as she knows, you say anything to make yourself appear to be something besides what you are. This is normal for kids whose families have committed suicide by divorce. She's ignorant of every aspect of life beyond Mom's boyfriends, spats with other 8-year-old-girls, and the fornication, mutilation and snuff films she sees on cable TV. Danny, the 6-year-old, is on track to become a sexual predator and is under the closest surveillance when he visits us.
Her friends, her parent(s) and the parents of her friends are no different. There's an entire anti-culture out there consisting of 20- and 30-something parents whose families committed suicide a couple of decades ago, whose own families have committed suicide, who neglect their children, who couldn't care less where their kids are during the day or evening as long as they're not underfoot at home, who have no interest in life beyond jobs, bills, TV and fornication.
Lisa and I and the kids, simply by being what we are, are flooding these children with the only spiritual life they've ever known.
Posted by billw at September 15, 2003 09:51 AMsee my comments here:
http://www.freewebs.com/southfarthing/
Posted by: Samwise at September 15, 2003 08:26 PMThese are the families that I care for during and after their pregnancies. It is now into the 3rd generation for some of them. I try to love the sinners and hate the sins, and I try to challenge them to look at what they are doing to themselves and their children.
It is so often like casting the seed on rocky soil.
I will pray for your neighborhood kids when I pray for my patients.
It is a sad world out there. And I am still surprised by how many Renees and Dannys there are. (And their older counterparts, who, when they find out I have six children are amazed that they all have the same father.) Reminds me of a long surreal bus trip I took 2 years ago. There was a little (about 7) girl traveling with her 'older' (about 12!) sister from Minneapolis to Chicago. I wasn't in the mood to chat, but she was persistant and I figured if she was talking to me she was chatting flirtatiously with the weird assortment of men on the bus....so we talked. And talked. And she asked me a zillion questions. Do I have children? Do I have a boyfriend? All sorts of questions that bespoke of her home environment. (At first my naive self thought, oh, she must think I look really young. Boyfriend? Do I look 17?) I had to get off the bus in Madison (i.e. that was the destination on the ticket.) I was really worried about those girls...If my husband hadn't been driving up to Madison to fetch me, I might have been tempted to stay on the bus just to make sure that they got to Chicago safely. What the heck - it would have been only about 8 more hours (including a nice long stopover in Milwaukee)
Just by being you, you are doing more for those children than any remedial school or social programs. You are showing them a wholly, holy different way of life.
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