Tough Love – Mom and Dad you were right…

While you read this, just hear me out and keep an open mind to what I’m saying. I’m going to sound like a jerk in some parts, but keep reading and ask yourself these two questions: Does truly loving someone mean you are kind to them? Is being kind to someone truly loving them?

We go to Care Points for a few hours every morning. There are eight Care Points that I’ll be, more or less, looking after. So the team comes with and we play these hilarious African “Sunday School” games and really cool African dances, until I set up some sort of Vacation Bible School thing. And in the midst of all this mamble jamble, we’re just goofing around and givin these kids’ attention and the love that they don’t get unless white people come around. Now this sounds all peachy and like we are solving a problem, but are we really solving it or just adding wood to the fire? What we’ve noticed is how much we get taken advantage of… 

Getting taken advantage of is easy in these situations, one, because there is a “white superiority” in the minds of African people, and two, because they think we have everything and will give it to them even if they don’t really need it. And it seems like the teams who came through here in the past were alright with getting taken advantage of and really I can’t blame them. Honestly, it’s nice. You seem much appreciated and like your filling a need that the children have when they ask for money or fight the other kids off to hold both your hands instead of one, and that your building easy relationships and making friends and everyone just loves you so much and you’re so popular with the children. It’s easy and nice to fulfill the requests of food, or picking up the children when they fake cry just to be held, or giving away your guitar because a guy tells you how much he loves it but can’t afford to buy one, or giving all your attention to one child who is hanging all over you and neglecting the others. But how is this love that we’ve been showing and that they children are used to getting from all the missionaries sustainable?… I can sound like the biggest butt face in the world by explaining how we get taken advantage of by these people, people who are forced into prostitution “just to make ends meet,” but after I leave and when these kids go back to their regular lives without a long curly haired white boy around, what would my time here and all the requests I fulfilled mean to them? Nothing… because they take advantage of us to get the moment sustaining love that they desire so much because the kids know they can get things they want from the God loving white people who will get rid of everything they have.

The love that we have been sharing and that they have received time and time again is not genuine. It’s like a crack high; you get so high off of one crack hit, higher than any high you’ve been before and it feels so good, but it doesn’t last long and when its gone you want to smoke some more crack to get that feeling back. Make sense? And that’s what the children do when they get any of this so called “love” from us. It’s a crack binge.

So I’ve been facing a question that goes something like this: How can we change this? What do we do to give them true genuine love, Jesus love, love that will sustain? What can be done to teach these children things that they will carry for the rest of their lives, fruit that I won’t see? It’s easy to do actions that will produce fruit in that moment, like when a child wines and persistently climbs up your legs trying to make you pick them up and you do. But that fruit is going to rot fast. How is that a bad thing though? It teaches the children that they can get their “crack hit” and they can get the “crack hit” from the white people. Problem with that is, is that the love (crack hit) they are getting from the white people is not sustainable and the crack hit love is only hurting that child more and more, its false hope in false love. So the answer to my first questions is: Bring them Jesus. Everything always goes back to Jesus. But what does that look like? Tough love. These kids need to be taught many things in these developmental years and putting a little girl down from your lap to hold another little girl, even though the she is gonna cry, is the sort of tough Jesus love we need to show these children. Another example, a girl here is 15, doesn’t live with her parents but shares a house with a Gogo and 4 other boys and has a month old rape baby from her uncle. She asked us to give her a job like cleaning the house so she can have some money. She is one of our close friends here and even comes with us to do ministry, but we’ve also learned how she takes advantage of us. So we decided that if she doesn’t clean or do her job were not gonna pay her even though it would be really helpful regardless but teach herself discipline and that it’s not alright to keep taking for granite people’s love and we’re gonna pay her in baby supplies instead of money. She’s not gonna die and neither is her baby if we don’t pay her if she doesn’t do her job, she’s 15 and rebellious and we need to truly love her by doing this for her. It’s kind of like why Jesus taught in parables. See he could have explained everything so plain and blunt (us giving “crack love”) and giving people the information they need to have eternal life, but instead he made the people think so that they could discover in their hearts the Kingdom of Heaven (us giving the kids sustainable tough love). Jesus could have straight up given the people all the information they need to know of how to find the Kingdom, but then they would only “know information,” instead he taught in ways that they would have to know for themselves and discover where their heart truly is, which you don’t get to the Father by knowing, you get to him by your heart. So pray that real love, Jesus’ love, will pour out of us to the children at these Care Points and to all the little children and people stealing our food and still asking for more, so that they can have sustainable Jesus when we leave and they can’t depend on the white people to take care of them anymore. They need the hope of their savior so badly.