Kingdom.
If you want a snapshot of what college looks like in the movies, come to the main square of Lipscomb University on a 75 degree day.
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You’ll see fifty or sixty people throwing frisbees or footballs, listening to loud music, and looking young, attractive, and successful. I had a test at 2pm today but I finished it inside of ten minutes, so I spent the rest of the hour I was supposed to be in class out in the square. It was awesome, and I caught myself thinking, “This must be heaven.”
Yesterday, I went to help out at an afterschool program. It’s called Harvest Hands, and they literally have the best childcare system I’ve ever seen. The leaders teach the seven habits of highly effective people, which come from a book that changed my life last year. Six year olds are genuinely learning skills I only picked up on at nineteen.
I read a book this past winter break called Hillbilly Elegy. It’s written by a man who was raised in a working class white home. His mom was a drug addict who brought a rotating door of father figures into his life, which forced his grandparents to do most of the parenting.
He grew up to attend Yale Law and become a successful lawyer, and the book describes his journey. At one point, he made the connection that fighting at home made him sluggish in school. He had trouble doing homework or paying attention, and often lashed out at teachers.
It was only the influence of his grandmother and a few incredible teachers that pushed him to college. He interviewed teachers from his high school for the book, and a quote from one of them has been burned into my mind to this day.
“They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”
The thing that makes Harvest Hands interesting is these kids are from one of the poorer neighborhoods in Nashville. The first day I went to volunteer there, we drove past a teenager going after another kid with a lead pipe in the streets. There was a shooting in an apartment complex a while back, and just yesterday we saw a woman getting arrested with a brick of cocaine in the trunk of her car.
The kids at Harvest Hands have a stupid amount of potential, but they’re also a little rough around the edges in ways that kids from other neighborhoods just aren’t. As incredible as the curriculum is at Harvest Hands, it’s also the most chaotic program I’ve ever seen.
I got to ride the bus that takes them all home last night, and midway through the ride, I noticed one of the kids was asleep. That was a blessing on a bus full of kids screaming and yelling, but then it came time for the sleeping child to get off the bus.
I know for a fact this kid is having serious trouble in his family, and when I tried to wake him up I realized he was only pretending to be asleep because he didn’t want to go home. In that moment I looked around the bus and the neighborhood we were in and felt my soul rend and tear for everyone who lived in it.
I’m in no position to make conclusive claims about most of these kid’s home environments, but many of them display the same symptoms that the author of Hillbilly Elegy outlined. Their roughness seems to be a product of the circumstances they’re raised in rather than just them being bad kids.
I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.
That’s Revelation 21:4–6. The book gets a bad rap for being about the end of the world, but anything in the book that’s good or bad or cryptic points to this moment. It’s the coming of a new creation where God makes everything right; new heaven and new earth meet in the fulfillment of what creation was meant to be.
I’ve prayed for the fulfillment of that scripture before, but never as hard as I did on that bus last night.
I prayed for safety over the kids. I prayed for peace, grace, and kindness in their homes. I prayed that God would wipe away the tears of the kids burying their face in their backpack so no one could see them cry. I prayed for economic revitalization that wouldn’t force people from their homes in the way gentrification often does.
I prayed God’s will be done and His Kingdom come on this earth as it is in heaven. I also prayed that God would give me the ability to be a part of the solution rather than the problem. There are days my life looks like heaven on earth. There are days people say they like my sunglasses and my shirt and my shorts and my hair and my face, and I finish tests in 8 minutes, and I waste my afternoons showing off with perfect spirals to all who will watch.
I never had days where I was afraid to go home. I went to a school system where talking back to a teacher was downright unacceptable, and getting into a fight would have ended in not just suspension, but social suicide.
There are gangs in the neighborhoods these kids are growing up in. If that’s the best life these kids have ever seen, it’s easy to understand the appeal. I guess I want to show them there’s something better. At the very least, I can’t sit by and watch kids pay the price for being raised in something less than what I had.
There was a huge storm in Florida one year, and it washed thousands of fish onto a beach. A child took a walk to see the spectacle, and saw an older man by the water. The man picked up a fish and threw it back into the water. He walked to another fish, and did the same. The kid approached him and said, “What’re you doing?! There’s too many fish, you’ll never make a difference!”
The old man smiled, picked up another fish, and threw it into the water. He watched the fish struggle through a wave and make it clear to the ocean, and then he turned to the boy and said, “I made a difference to that one, didn’t I?”
I might be young and prideful and a lot bit reckless. Frankly, it might not be possible for me to make a difference in the lives the kids at Harvest Hands end up living, and it’s probably incredibly prideful for me to think that I can. I know only God can truly bring this world to what it’s supposed to be, and I pray for that future to come quickly every day.
In the meantime, all I can do is try to be a part of it’s coming, and so I’m going to keep going back to Harvest Hands. I’m going to love them as well as I can, and I’m going to do everything I can to help the kids there live into something better than what they’re surrounded by.
Originally published at theforlornemoose.wordpress.com on March 7, 2017.
