Hope is hard to come by these days, so when you find it, you need to latch onto it with the jaws of life. I saw this concept firsthand this past week. I was in Springfield, IL with my FCA working at a homeless shelter called Inner City Mission. It's not your typical homeless shelter. It's more like an apartment complex that takes in the homeless and helps rehabilitate them. I don't really like the word "homeless," though. It depersonifies people. It numbs us to the pain that these very real people have gone through.
There are a lot of kids at ICM. Most of them are less than ten. Most of them have already seen far more of the dog-eat-dog world out there than any of us will see in our entire lifetimes. Pain is all they ever knew before ICM.
The first full day we were there, we took the kids for a walk. I was carrying one of the kids on my shoulders. I made the mistake of suggesting we try to get a group picture. I picked the kid up off my shoulders. He didn't want to get off. He began to cry. I tried to tell him that it would only take thirty seconds, but he refused to settle down. Enough of the other kids were acting crazy that we wound up having to abort the picture. I picked the kid up and put him back on my shoulders. He was still furious. We walked around the block again, and the entire way he was talking to himself about how angry he was at me. He threatened me. His words were kind of muttered, but I did manage to make out the words, "Head off." It's not hard to figure out what verb he had used a second earlier. I wasn't particularly mad at him. I was just shocked at his reaction to something that seemed trivial to me. It was the first real taste I had had of the pain these kids have gone through.
A few days later, I had the kid on my shoulders again. Something he said to me caught my attention. He said he thought there were monsters on the floor. The only place he felt safe was on someone's shoulders. All of a sudden everything came into focus. When I had set him down days earlier, it had seemed to him like I was abandoning him, leaving him to the monsters. Of course I hadn't known that at the time, but to him, I was acting like almost everyone else in his world. He needed my shoulders, and I wasn't there for him. From that point on, I was determined to have my shoulders ready and waiting to keep him safe.
People always talk about wanting to be the "hands and feet of God." If I may elaborate on that a little bit, I think ICM is the "shoulders of God." It plucks people out of the monster-filled real world and puts them where the monsters can't get to them. It brings redemption. Through ICM, God is delivering that elusive hope to some of the people that need it the most. -- Nathan