It starts and ends here: the child asks me a question.

“Mommy, can you come to Friday chapel today?” my six year old says. I tell him that I would love to do it another time but that I can’t today.

“Oh. Are you going to jail?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him.

And I spend the morning visiting and worshiping with the group of women I wrote about back here.

I listen to their small group discussion over the Bible lesson. It’s the rich young ruler we discuss, and we all at that metal table find our likeness somewhere in his shoes… wanting to hold onto Jesus and something else too… willing to fall on our knees and cry “You are good” yet not quite believing He’s good enough to leave everything for. We contemplate the young man’s response to Christ’s recitation of the law. He says, “I have kept all these since I was a boy.” I read his words and my heart says, “Bull. You have not. I know that game. That false sense of satisfactory performance. As if the sinful human who has truly lived under the law would have the audacity to stand over the law and say ‘done’.” The rich young ruler speaks my native language and it is pride, and I am on to him because I was him.

Then one of the inmates reads her own words scrawled in her workbook. She has not lived under any delusion of self-righteousness. Not for a long time. She knows her unworthiness. And the tears that redden her eyes as she shares her gratitude for God’s grace bring to mind Jesus’ words to the religious leaders in Matthew 21:31 “…The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

Literally.

Nonetheless, the women I sit with at that table are living with very challenging realities… lives marked with sure consequences, some of which will remain with them for the remainder of their time on this earth. And as I look around at each of them I think how might your life had been different had you started walking with Christ twenty years ago? If someone had intervened when you were…

It is the previous afternoon and I am at Edison Middle School… which is very different from my recollections of junior high. For instance, none of my friends had probation officers. Nor did we have full time police officers patrolling our campus. None of my classmates ever spent the day running up and down the hall screaming profanities, taunting the authorities to “come and get him” and then hiding all over the place until finally apprehended by the cops. We were real small town like that.

One of the older students wanders the hall past my perch at the welcome desk, and I ask him where he’s supposed to be. He mumbles that he walked out of so and so’s class because she threw a book at him and hit him upside the head and now his head hurts. I smile and tell him to get back to class and stop giving his teacher reasons to throw things at him. He smiles, knowing that he has not fooled me with his innocence but complains again that his head hurts. I shake my head, tell him I’m pretty sure he can handle himself and urge him to go learn just one thing. “Just one thing,” I plead with him, “You can do that.” And to my surprise he nods and goes.

Maybe.

It was a hard afternoon honestly. Hard to see the power of grace through so much broken. So. Much. Broken. The parade of f-bombs past my desk as the kids change classes makes me sit there and think how do you get this hard by middle school? How are things this broken this early in life? And even before…

It is hours earlier in the morning when I am at Carver Elementary to work with my kindergartners, trying in meager minutes to make up gaps that are already widening and stretching like a canyon between them and a future of hope and fullness. I walk into the class with all those little bodies hopping around. Like fleas.

Really. They are 70% human, 30% flea at that age.

Their teacher, who is also part angel, welcomes me with her beautiful gray hair and tired smile. “I don’t know if I’m gonna make it, Sarah,” she says with a laugh. And amid the sea of hugs that the little crowd of flea-humans come to give, one little girl calls to me. She is tiny, and she is the one I wrote about here. And the child asks me a question:

Are you still praying for me???

Yes, sweetheart. I am praying like mad. Like a person with eyes wide open to what might so easily lie ahead for you and wide open to the so much better– so much better– that might otherwise lie ahead for you. I am praying like mad.