Fighting in the Streets

For the past month or so, our elementary school students have been exploring the community. This has included team building experiences, reviewing our program’s community standards, lessons on the body of Christ, unity and diversity, “about me” inventories where children look at how they are can serve the entire community, etc.

This week we held an amazing activity on “good community versus bad community” that couldn’t have gone better. In a nutshell, a volunteer from Biola University succinctly led the children in a productive look at how their actions can cause good or bad community.

I was excited that perhaps the content of this lesson might yield change in the lives of the children I love so much – children who often come from situations punctuated by dysfunction and brokenness.

The next night I had a sober reminder of what we are up against. About half of the children in our program live in two notorious downtown residential hotels. We return them to these hotels every night. During a normal drop off at one of the hotels where six children live, we arrived to see all but one of their respective parents in an out and out brawl. It was a painful disappointment to need to protect the children from their own parents.

I don’t know the reason for the fight, and could care less about who was right and who was wrong. I do care very much that six children whose lives have intersected with mine in a remarkable way for the past few years, in witnessing this fight, learned a lesson on community that will likely win out as they steer the course of their lives.

My hope for the children I serve is that their formative years and adulthood could be a sharp contrast from their childhoods. And as much as I want these children to bravely stand up against the systems they have inherited, I am beginning to think that will be unlikely when the power of the parents’ lifestyles is so pervasive. No one will have a greater influence in a life of a child than their parents. Sadly this is especially true for parents who fight with their neighbors in front of their children.

JH