This month has been rough for me, not only because of the night shifts, the lack of sleeping hours, and the cold, but mainly because of the things I’m forced to recognize, unfortunate realities of this world and knowing there’s not much I can do.
Our time working with the refugees has consisted of handing out clothes and crowd controlling in attempt to keep large mobs of people in some form of order rather than total anarchy. Among the thousands we serve every night, I watch hundreds, if not thousands, of adolescent teens, children, and toddlers pass by among the others and my heart can’t help but hurt for them.
The reason I absolutely love youth ministry, aside from the games and absurd madness that is youth ministry, is that I see in my students great potential to change the world. In coming generations, I see people who will change culture in ways that generations before them have failed. I see students who carry big dreams and how they are far more capable than they could ever know.
This is why it pains me to watch a young man, forced to leave his education behind, carry his baby sister across the border, all the while telling her stories and doing everything he can to keep a smile on her face as they walk through the bitter cold. I can’t help but imagine their future and how the hardships of this forced new life will slowly weather away at their dreams. I see hope lost for a brighter tomorrow, not only for these kids, but for the world as more and more youth walk through life no longer believing the impossible is possible.
I’m reminded of a particular dialogue in the Lord of the Rings where Sam and Frodo sat in the ruins of a city destroyed by war. One calm evening as they overlooked the Black Gate and the perilous journey to Mount Doom, Frodo questions the journey and talks of turning back home. Sam replies,
“Sam: It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it’s only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it’ll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo, I do understand, I know now folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.
I once met a man who taught me that life was whimsical. He was filled with stories of uniting unlikely worlds and bringing peace to disputes raging for years on end. He talked about how his office came to be Tom Swayer Island in the heart of Disneyland and how through a series of absurd events he became the representative of Uganda. As he sat in his backyard looking out into the coast of San Diego telling stories from his life that one could hardly believe to be true, I learned that life can truly be magical if we make it to be.
I promise to grow old but never grow up, to run through life wearing a cape and believing that good is always worth fighting for. I promise to never stop believing God is telling a great story, and the beauty of a child born in a manger some 2000 years ago. To the young men and women pressing on in the dead of winter with nothing but the packs on their back and mountains before them, I promise that there is hope and that life is beautiful.
