Children Killing Children

(This picture was taken last evening of family members, teachers, and friends outside Providence Hospital in Southfield, Michigan after a young man was gunned down outside his high school. I believe the woman in the dark blue shirt being hugged is the boy's mother.)

On the news last night, there was a story about a shooting at a Northwest Detroit High School. As with any school shooting or any act of violence involving children or teens that I hear about or read about, I find myself sitting with tears in my eyes. A 16-year-old basketball-loving young man was shot three times and died. His mother and then his sister tearfully explained how he was taken from then so senselessly, and I was reminded of why my passion for young people is so strong.

So many young people are struggling. They are struggling to live; they are struggling not to die early and unfulfilled. They are fighting a battle that many were set to lose before birth. And the root cause of the struggle is the absence of fathers (and sometimes mothers). I encounter so many teenagers in my daily work at Clintondale High (and in other environments where I have staked my claim) who battle with not having (especially) a father to love them, guide them, and validate them. So they battle with life. And in the case of the boy that was killed, it can be at times a losing battle.

Yesterday afternoon, about two hours before that 16-year-old was killed, a young man sat in my office. We talked for nearly two hours about the direction his life was going. He graduated from the high school last school year and is planning on attending an area college for Computer Engineering. We started with talking about his future and ended up focusing a lot of our discussion around his past, around his beginnings. We focused attention on his relationship with his parents.

He told me he was very angry as a little boy because his father was not there. He was hanging around the fringes of his life but was not actively a part of the everyday times. This young man expressed that now that he is older he is not so much angry as he is realizing that his father had his own issues that kept him from being the kind of father he needed.

This young man also talked about his mother and how he could not figure out how she had raised him and his two siblings on her own without intervention from their fathers. The truth was all three children were turning out far better than statistics dictated, and the truth was they recognized their futures - unlike so many young people today that do not even think about the future because they do not believe they have one. But these three believe they have something to look forward to because their mother made sure that their futures would be protected no matter what.

When I got home and heard the report about the school shooting, all I could think about was the young man in my office, the teens that travel the halls at my school, and even the young people in my personal life that I care so deeply for. And I began to cry. I cried for how our babies are suffering and struggling and need their fathers. I cried for the souls of the children and teens that leave this earth so prematurely. I cried for the young man whose life was so tragically ended in gunfire.

This morning as I drove to work again, as I returned to the trenches again, I thought about how important fathers are. I did not have mine growing up and a lot of the teens I encounter in some way, form, or fashion do not have active father figures in their lives either. And it is not fair. I wondered where the fathers of those shooters were. The shooters yesterday were children themselves (15, 16, and 18) and the targets that were hit besides the young man that died were also 15 and 16 years of age respectively. Where were their daddies???? Were there any men in their lives at all????

To be honest, God sent men into my life to save me from a life of the streets, of sexual immorality, of poverty. If I had not had them - my grandfather, my stepfather, my uncle, my youth pastor, and my godfather - I may have ended up as a tragedy myself. I needed those men, and the children that do not have their fathers need men to stand up too. I grieve for this generation that does not have father figures to teach them - especially our young men. They are teaching themselves and living by the laws of the streets...kill or be killed.

There is a new song titled "My Life" put out by The Game and Lil' Wayne that is playing in heavy rotation on area radio stations. (Sidebar: The anthems of hip-hop are the songs of this generation. Their whole philosophies of life are based around the words of these artists that talk about the hard life of the ghetto, of the poor, of those who are indeed in the marginalized areas of all of our communities. The Game and Wayne are just examples of this. I have heard their music - have listened to the harsh poetry of the life I know but was blessed to escape.)

In this song, The Game says these lines: "...Like I needed my father, but he needed a needle." People ask why the young people love rap so much, why they repeat the lines, but won't pick up a book to read. The answer? Because they can bear witness to lines like this one and books may seem so far removed from the life they see everyday.

The young man in my office yesterday told me that his father drinks every day, gets "blowed" (smokes weed and drinks alcohol). Even now, he can't believe if his father calls him up (which he has been doing a lot more lately) to tell him that he loves him. He wants to believe that his father does love him but it is hard to believe when it seems like the father that should have helped raise you loves alcohol and weed and women and everything else in the world more than you.

The kids sing the songs because they know that what they hear is the only truth they will ever know unless someone enters in to change their perspective. Specifically, they need father figures to teach them about life and the correct battles to fight. Angry kids are fighting false battles - against other angry kids and that means lives are being lost in the crossfire.

So...I endeavor to be here for the young men and women like the ones that sit in my office to talk, that share with me their stories, that unburden their pains in my lap because I am woman enough to take it (straight to Jesus) and woman enough to care what happens to them. That is why I am here. God please help our kids. Please save them.