This is a poem I wrote about my experiences with a street boy in Cambodia. He confronted me with suffering I don’t know how to explain away, which led to a month of wrestling with the Lord, & ultimately coming to the conclusion that I am no savior. All I can do in a fallen world is love, be obedient to my Lord, & trust in Him.
Jon
You challenge me without knowing.
You don’t see me seeing you, but the fact that I do is an honor that causes me grief.
I am now accountable.
People pretend not to see you.
I am no better than them.
But I see you.
Wings clipped & potential choked out.
You with your innocence taken as if it were free instead of costly.
You with a mouth that won’t tell me what you should have been.
You with heart hardened against your will.
You with your love extinguished by what is expected of you by pimp, & reputation built to protect you from feeling even the good things, if anything in your life is good.
Prone to suffer.
You’ve been emptied by a life that would be hard-lived by a strong man.
You are the strongest boy I’ve ever met.
The boy who stood at the starting line of this human race with a handicap of love-lacked & neglect.
Yet here you are, right beside me, & you’ll stay when I leave.
Struggling from sunrise to sunset.
They tell you that you were born merely to survive.
Even if that means glazing reality over with the hallucinogens they use to placate you.
Getting you addicted.
Getting you dependent.
I hope one day you bite the hand that feeds you falsities & poisons.
Your situation, which is something far deeper than misfortune (otherwise I’d be able to breathe right now) makes me reconsider everything.
Is my God good?
Is my God good?!
Does my God see?
.
.
.
He does.
And He is.
When we first met, you taunted me.
Words fell off your tongue with great disdain & I didn’t taste them but you spit them out like they were bitter, so I trusted that they were.
I wish you didn’t learn those words in English.
I remember how it felt for my heart to take shelter in my stomach in fear that it couldn’t stand to feel anymore of what you feel.
And I’ve only been allowed to know a measure of your hurt.
So I won’t pretend to understand.
You’ve been masked with malice by masters mastered by their moral depravity, marred by the mourning of the murdered minor they once were.
A martyr, you are.
Before your mind reached maturity, they decided they’d help you kill yourself here, manipulate & medicate you, then parade you as their puppet.
Put on your game face.
Put on your armor.
”Let your purpose be evoking pity from the tourists,” they said, ”’cause I need my money.”
Hide your adult anger somewhere far away from your child face.
You spit at me.
I don’t care.
I love you, & I’m not just saying that because I’m supposed to, I’m saying that because I can feel it.
And I don’t know how & I don’t know why because I never would have been able to love you back in the days when I wasn’t alive with the breath of a God who doesn’t allow me to just…make sense of all this & rest in my own pride.
I will boast in Christ & Him crucified.
This is the hope, both yours & mine.
You allowed me to pray for you.
And you gave me a chance.
And hostility died.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Which has become today.
It’s monsoon season & I love the rain.
Rain like mercy & cleansing.
I love the rain, & you walking up to me out of the downpour.
You ask me for baby milk out of habit before seeing who I am.
But then you look up, & you see me.
And you gasp in a good way…and you smile for the first time.
Your nature as a child compels you to count my care for you more valuable than the assignment from your captor.
So you wrap your arms around my ribs & squeeze with welcome force, like you want to hold on as long as you can, & I will be for you what your Mother never was, even though I’m a stranger…what trust you give, little one. If only it weren’t taken advantage of.
And you’re shaking from the cold.
And your heart is bare, like your feet.
And you murmur things under your breath, as if you’re finally defeating the voices in your head & succeeding at just being a kid for once.
Thank you for being yourself.
I have never been so honored to see someone as they are.
You held on for dear life until you had to let go.
You, gentle.
You, traumatized.
You, needy.
You, beautiful.
You, lost.
You, desperate to be found.
The next day, I saw you at the market, & you were high.
You didn’t remember who I was.
And I saw in your small body the pain of 10 lifetimes compressed into 10 years.
What do the monks think you did in your past life to deserve this?
You don’t deserve this.
And I hope you know that.
When you clung to me my heart broke as easily as your defenses.
And I prayed that God would take you in.
And I hoped that the world wouldn’t continue to make you callous.
There’s Someone who loves you better than I do.
And He will come to rescue & save.
The wicked will not prosper forever, & unrighteousness must shut it’s mouth before Him.
He loves the orphan & the widow, & shows mercy to the downtrodden & oppressed.
He sets the captive free.
One day His justice will roll like rivers, Jon…just you wait & see.
*When I mention a pimp in the poem, I am referring to the person in control of the child. Whether or not the child is involved in sex-trafficking, they are still involved in modern day slavery, being abused, indoctrinated, controlled & drugged by their captor whom they bring all of their money back to after long days of begging. When I mention drug use I am referring to the distribution of drugs to the children by their pimps with the intention of getting them hooked, so they have a reason to remain attached. When I mention baby milk I am referring to a scam common in South East Asia, in which children (or young women with drugged babies worn in a sling on their hip) are used in a corrupt cycle of begging tourists to buy intentionally overpriced milk powder from storeowners whom pimps have an agreement with that assures the storeowners a cut & the pimps a cut.
