“After working with *Ramona for 6 or 7 years she prepared to move and work in Austria with her mom as a prostitute
I told my mentor, I have to buy her an apartment, we need people to watch out for her, we have to do something
He said ‘Let her go.’”
The kids we have worked with this month have been energetic and decidedly teenager-y. They sing Justin Bieber at the top of their lungs. They eat their weight in junk food, then complain of upset stomachs. They stare at you like you’ve asked them to deal with quantum physics if you ask them to turn down their music.
They are being trained as prostitutes and pimps.
Our host partners have known the kids in the ghetto for 10 years. They’ve poured their hearts out to reflect the heart of the Lord. Sometimes love looks like taking kids bowling, worshiping on Sunday nights, laughing at the zoo. Sometimes love looks like adopting a girl whose parents, grandparents, and aunt have died.
Love always looks like trusting the Lord’s love is more sufficient. Especially when you have to let one of your children go.
During the summer our host partners take the kids to a camp in the mountains. For one weekend these kids experience the wonder of God’s creation that exists hundreds of miles from their ghetto.
My team had the opportunity to join in on the gloriously exhausting fun.
As can be expected when bringing 35 teenagers to a weekend long getaway, we were met with some challenges. Our struggle at camp was not only trying to keep the boys out of the girl’s rooms or kids from smoking in the bathroom.
As promised in Ephesians, “[o]ur battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Believe me when I saw we felt the war.
The first night Cristen shared her testimony. As she spoke, my teammates and I prayed fiercely that chains would be broken and walls would come crashing down. After, the kids were invited to find an adult. As we hugged and prayed for them, tears flowed out of even the toughest young man.
Pastor Christie described some boys who were trying to disrupt the love in the room.
“It was like a bull when released into a crowd of people. It doesn’t charge. It moves around the people and doesn’t harm them.”
We fought with God harder than the enemy. That first night was a victory. Even so, the weekend was filled with a palpable atmosphere of internal pain, desensitization, and the struggle to understand love.
As a response, Haylee suggested we take shifts on an all night prayer watch. Each night was covered in prayer and each day the Lord gave us the energy we needed to pour out his love (I’m convinced sometimes God pours out his love in the form of coffee).
Prayer is powerful. It’s the most tangible way I know how to fight.
One of the boys who has been wrestling with fear told us “it was one of the best nights of sleep I’ve gotten!”
On the second day we took the kids for a hike up the base of a mountain. It was a gentle slope and a few miles long, but making it to the goal was a test of endurance in which the kids are not normally engaged. One of our girls, *Sadie, sat down after a half hour, exclaiming she was done. Through encouragement, Sadie made it another half hour before finding another rock. And another rock. And another rock. She convinced herself she couldn’t climb any farther. We told her she could. And she did. When Sadie reached the top her face was absolutely beaming. I asked her how she felt, and she told me she felt like she could do anything in the world.
I support taking kids into nature to show them at a bare roots level what they are made of. What they are capable of. These kids, destined for a life of poverty and miscreantism, are capable of not only climbing mountains, but moving them.
Between little *Russell’s constant encouragement and concern when even one of the staff appeared tired, the shrieks of girls when a bug flew near, and the general awe of a child mesmerized by the forest, my heart overflowed with the joy the Lord has for his children.
On the bus ride home the kids laughed in the over exhausted excited way kids get after camp. Though assigned to chaperone duty, I enjoyed sitting and talking (with the help of Google Translate) to some of the girls.
15 minutes from home they stood in the isles dancing like it was Prom (I have a newfound respect for chaperones at high school dances), screaming “The Ghetto! The Ghetto! The Ghetto!” They stopped listening to instruction and focused only on the normalcy of late nights and parties. I lost them.
But then, I never really had them.
It’s not up to me to change a heart in a weekend. Our hosts don’t expect to change hearts in 10 years. But the Lord, he knows no limits. His love is everlasting, unsearchable, and relentless. Only the Lord can change a heart. It’s up to us to show glimpses of his heart and pray a reflection will appear, even if it starts dim and we never see the whole picture.
“Ramona, she is back here now.”
You never know what the Lord is going to do.
*Names have been changed
