Tuesday, I wanted to give up. I am surrounded by hopelessness. Every morning, I walk to work, past 9 or 11 or 14 homeless men, huddled under tarps or blankets, sometimes a bare foot sticking out, making me wonder how they have the will power to keep moving, keep struggling to survive. Prostitutes standing in doorways have just become routine; I happen to notice they’re less provocatively dressed on a chilly, rainy Sunday afternoon. Half a block away from my house a couple approach me, 3-year-old son trailing behind. There’s a joint in the dad’s hand, he passes it to the boy’s mother as I walk past them, hurrying to escape the overwhelming smell of marijuana.
At work, I open an email, from some organization fighting poverty somewhere. “What’s the best way to fight poverty?” the subject line asks. Inside, they ever-so-optimistically proclaim, “provide education” and go on to encourage you to sponsor a child. And I wonder why they make it sound so easy. It isn’t enough to send a kid to school, teach them to read. My kids are all learning to read. They’re adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing. But I’m discouraged. One family, with 9 children, rents 2 small rooms daily. One room is as wide as a single bed. The parents and 3 youngest children sleep there. The other 6 kids share the other room, mattresses on a floor. Absences are frequent as the bigger kids stay home to help with the littler ones as their parents run errands, trying to make a better life for their family. Even the oldest, who seems most motivated to succeed, is falling behind in school work.
My students fight, argue with their teachers, complain about everything and anything, and don’t show any desire to change. The kids who were doing well last year, the ones we sent to normal schools, are almost all doing poorly, failing classes, missing days. The kids we decided we needed to work with more are making progress academically, but their hearts seem untouched. Sometimes behaviors even seem worse.
I feel overwhelmed. If their heart attitudes don’t change, if they don’t long to seek Jesus, if they stay in the same environment, education won’t do much for them. And I start to question everything- the hours and hours, the prayers and tears, the creative examples and book shopping, all for what? So they can throw it all away, live a religious but faithless life, selling things from a cart on the side of the street, having 5 kids with 4 different men by the time they’re 25, renting a room by the day? Can we really make a difference?
Where is God in all this? I really don’t believe he made this world and now will just let it run its course. I believe in divine intervention. But I’m not seeing it, here and now, in the lives of these kids. And I’m discouraged. Why don’t I have stories to tell about lives given to Christ, whole families being changed by the power of God at work? Why is it an uphill battle? Why do I see so little success, and so much of what fails like failure? Why does it all have to be so hard?
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Circumstances haven't changed. But hope creeps back in. Words in an email from my mom, "While we may seem to be failing--perhaps we are planting and watering where someone else will reap." A conversation with a friend about children who grow up in the church and leave, but come back to Christ later, "that was me" he said. And God's word, spoken in Isaiah 42 “I have held My peace a long time, I have been still and restrained Myself. Now I will cry like a woman in labor, I will pant and gasp at once. I will lay waste the mountains and hills, And dry up all their vegetation; I will make the rivers coastlands, And I will dry up the pools. I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, And crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, And not forsake them."
We don't always see God at work, but that doesn't mean he isn't working. God might be still and restrain himself for a time, but he won't forsake us. He called me here. His reasons for that haven't changed. I can never love more than Him.
So, I keep on, praying for more faith in a loving God in the dark.
