When I Die

I was struck yesterday by a thought. It was around 8pm, I was just innocently reading my Bible when my heart is cut right through by Matthew 16:26. I start to panic, it's a holy type of panic when it's for the salvation of the children that I'm now in charge of raising.

The thought of having my own children frightens me to death because I'm almost certain I'll be a horrendous mother, letting them get away with murder, spoiling them, or punishing them too harshly because I have no patience...

This is ten times worse! These are nothing like my own children... They're already half-way raised, and they have a mind, a heart, and a soul; all of which are in total dysfunction. If you mess up your own kids its because you didn't get it right from the start. These kids didn't get a fresh rosy start, and now their frame of mind depends wholly on my faith. I CHOSE to be here, I WANTED to teach them about Christ and love and life.

If I mess up, it's because I don't take enough pains to teach them. It's because I don't have the patience to sit down with them, one-on-one sometimes, to tell them about love, sin, redemption. Yes, they need to be reminded constantly that God loves them, and so do the people that care for them.

Abandoned children have all kinds of self-acceptance complexes to work around. It's no cake walk! It's not easy, it's not ironing out the kinks in a kid whose mother gave him too much chocolate or let him watch too much television. It's a child whose sense of self has been forever damaged because the one person that confirms his identity (on this earth) has chosen, or maybe it wasn't a choice - doesn't change the psychological repurcussions - to LEAVE them.

My job is not simply making sure they pick up their toys and brush their teeth. It's not even to make sure they read their Bible regularly. My job is to dig out the roots of their pain, to pray and fast for their eternity, and to remind them of the only constant Thing in their lives, the only Person that can change the course of their future. My job is to make sure they know all they need to know to turn the tide of their social label, their statistics, their stereotype.

And they can.

There are so many examples of God's love and his GRACE around me. It's easy to forget where we all came from, the mire, the crap, the slime of our past. It's easy to simply engage in a simple conversation about a track meet, when the fact is that the young man running in the University state championships next month is a miracle. An actual living work of God, taking him from abandonment and insecurity to a relationship with God that gives him a self-confidence, a surety of himself and his future...

He is one of many. My failure is often to forget that each one is God's fingerprint.

When I die, I want to know that I did all that I could indeed to make sure that these young ones God put in my charge don't end up ignorant either of His love, or of their potential.