Am I ready for this?

I’m reading this book by Joy and Ray Thomas called I’m Not at Risk, Am I? that is about AIDS and its affects. As I’m reading this chapter o n AIDS orphans, I find myself asking once again, “God, what were you thinking when you asked me to come here to do this? I’m nowhere near qualified, and I don’t have a long history of loving kids.”

In the chapter they talk about the emotional affects of AIDS-related deaths on children, and the growing phenomenon of child head of households and street kids as a result of AIDS. One of the things they capture is the feelings of guilt (if I’d taken better care of my sick mommy, then maybe she wouldn’t have died) and the tendency to internalize grief that children have when faced with extreme trauma and are not part of the dying process.

It was like God removed a scab that wasn’t quite healed. I remember like it was yesterday, feeling these things and knowing that no one understood what I was going through … and feeling like no one cared. When Wendy (my oldest sister) died in 1990 from cancer-related illnesses, I thought it was my fault. She was in my care at the time that the ambulance was called that took her away. I seriously thought that the doctors would give her medicine and she was coming back, just like she had so many times before. No one prepared me for the fact that this was the end, and she wouldn’t be coming back. I think everyone but my other sister (who is a medical doctor and had more of a clue than the rest of us) thought she was coming back as well. I never got to say goodbye. This has been a sore spot for me for years.

I’ve had issues with abandonment … anger at God for taking the one person I thought understood me … I lived for a long time with depression hanging over my head like a cloud … I thought for a long time that God took the wrong child. I still struggle to believe that people truly understand me, and if I were honest I’d say that deep down, part of me is waiting for the people I love to die. I know that dying is a part of living, and now my battle is to trust God in the living part.

I don’t believe that God took her so that I would be able to minister to orphans. I’m amazed that He’s putting me in this situation and find myself wondering if this season is as much for me as it is for the children He’s asking me to work with. He’s challenging me to see myself in these children I will be ministering to next year, and help them walk to healing in Him instead of living for years in the darkness that I lived. Their situation is much more dire … I still had my family to take care of me, even if they didn’t fully understand me. Many of these children are already on the streets, or being bounced around a crazy foster care system … some are prostituting themselves in order to survive and placing themselves at risk of the same disease that stole their childhood.

My goal is to love on these children and give them a safe place to be kids … a place where they can grow up to be everything that they desire to be. It’s to share with them the hope and future that they can have in Christ. I want to be a part of God giving them back their childhood. I just pray that God unlocks this in me as well, because I can still see myself as that little girl crying in a corner of the bathroom by herself, unsure what to do with the overwhelming sense of loss that’s hit like a ton of bricks.