The Prayer of the Children

This choir season, my favorite choir is singing the song you are probably familiar with: ''The Prayer of the Children". It strikes a raw chord with people who work in the field I do. There are so many broken stories I can't repeat for the sake of the children's privacy, but I will tell you that you don't have to go far to be able to find children begging for a little love. I can tell you of a few who literally go running crazy wild if you love on them cause they don't know how to handle it.

The most heartbreaking thing though is when you realize that all around you are adults who 'sang' this song as kids and never found 'loving arms' before they grew up. I will always remember the night she showed me the self inflicted cuts she had on her arm. I started crying because I realized she couldn't, and this was her "cry." I don't remember what all I said, but I remember her telling me to stop crying. Oh dear girl... It's not good to get emotional or react in front of struggling people, but I feel intuitionally that she needed to know her story is tears worthy.

While I was sitting at the mechanic shop this week, getting an oil change, the lady at the front desk and I got into a conversation. It's easy for people to throw money out there for you name it in situations like these mentioned above, but reality is, we need more bodies and people are willing to teach life skills, love, and enter into messy. It's hard to find people willing to make commitments like that. If you repeat the words of the song to yourself, it asks for loving arms away from harm, not for cash. 

I understand we are all busy. I get it. I am, too. I am not calling anyone out. I just want to invite you to the rich life of making a small difference in a child's life.

As we enter into the story of the kids down the street, we find our own brokenness as well, and together we can all find healing in loving arms.

As a PS to this post, I pray that the current heartbreaking situation in Haiti, as well as for the roughly half of the global refugee populations (65.6 million in 2017) who are under 18 that are vulnerable to all kinds of abuse, that especially these would find loving arms away from harm. Amen.