A Child’s Waking Nightmare; life

I’ve chosen perhaps one of the most emotionally draining pursuits you can choose- to provide psychiatric treatment for troubled youth. Some of them are just snotty rich kids who never learned no. But others never learned love; this is where I want to focus.

There are few things that can make me cry, perhaps even things that should. But this week I’ve been thinking about the dire circumstances in which some children live and it’s overwhelming. To think that there are children in this world who are treated as animals. That are locked in a room for years on end. Children used for sex by parents, neighbors, and siblings. Children becoming teenagers who have never heard an adult say “I love you” and so they loathe themselves, hurt themselves, or try and kill themselves because “it hurts too much to be alive”. This made me cry. Or they ask, “what does love mean?”

I think of the hymns I sing in church. Songs that praise the goodness of life; songs of endless mercy, justice, and universal love and brotherly kindness. It’s no surprise that many of these children do not believe in God, or see God as a cruel puppet master that likes to punish us. I also wonder how responsible they are for the person they become? If the child grows up with social problems, hygine deficiencies,  promiscuity, and trouble with the law, how much of that weight will fall on the parents shoulders?

In my darkest nightmare, I couldn’t have come up with some of the things that these children lived everyday.