I've been avoiding writing anything even though I've had this thought for awhile.

I realized this about four years ago...but I'm realizing it all over again.

After I ended my engagement, I was incredibly afraid that I would shut down my ability to care about human beings. I already believed even before I was engaged that I didn't have the ability to care enough. The different friendship situations going on the same time as that unhealthy relationship reinforced my inadequacy to truly love. Looking back I realize how I was utterly cornered in every aspect of my life by situations where I wasn't enough for the other individual. And I was trying to be. They were expecting me to be enough and I was trying to be enough. When I ended the engagement I had already ended those other relationships. It was the end of an era. I was already bitter and suspicious before all of this so why should I expect anything else? But something else happened.

After working at camp for that first summer, after working with kids for the first time and finding that unlike the lies my relationships taught me, I actually did have the ability to care, I knew I couldn't walk away from it. So I agreed to work in an after school program with inner city kids, on top of a heavy course load and another part time job. Tough kids. Kids that didn't usually listen to me. Kids that fought and yelled. I wasn't prepared to handle them. But working with kids is like falling in love. Kids consume you. They demand all of you with no promise of anything in return and you don't expect anything. And when they do give, they are completely unaware of it. It is without pretentiousness or expectation. It is without manipulation. It just happens.

That's why I can't walk away. I can be bitter and cynical about ANYTHING else in the world. But when a little black boy named Ali walks up to me with his puckered lips and dreads and looks me in the eye, he could ask the world of me and I would give it to him. And when I watch him as he sits crosslegged on the gym floor in the middle of a game without a care in sight as life flies by, he gives me the world.

It's like falling in love. But safer. Better yet, the perfect picture of grace. Because I know no matter how vehemently Musukulah says she hates me one day, the next day I will receive an excited greeting and a big hug. Even as I get so frustrated that I want to scream, I can't help but smile. They always open my heart, even when I fight it with every fiber of my being. They see through my facade and aren't afraid to tell it like it is. It never stings for long for they are children so honest words are easily forgiven. After all they don't know any better.

Or maybe they do.

Maybe we could learn a thing or two from them.
The honesty and vulnerability of a child....even admist his or her corruption.