No Soul is Irredeemable from Destructive Patterns and Cycles.
There is a way out the chaos.
A distance of ninety-three kilometres can be done in one and a half hour. The trip with the young 16-year-old girl felt like many years. The car becomes a type of time capsule as I learn of her huge losses and rejection in her short life and I can’t help but notice how streetwise she is and how quickly she fluctuates from fight to flight, both in her demeanour and her conversation and her resistance.
The social worker and I accompany her to an evaluation care centre for assessment.
Uncertainties hide behind defiance in her green eyes and panic chokes her talk at times. She gives staccato answers. Answers that she thinks we would like to hear, “I’m doing really well at school,” she boasts, oblivious to the fact that we know about her 20% average score, her smoking, and her drug use. But, we also know of her shattered childhood and dreams and aspirations, her yearning for family love and life.
Arriving at the facility she panics, “it looks like a prison! I can’t stay here. I won’t!”, she protests. Then, her sharp wit took over when she enters the facility. A security person asks her where she stays, “In a house”, she snaps to her defence and to the amusement of everyone. She turns and whispers in my ear, “Auntie, he doesn’t have to know where I live!”
The assessments of children are done by psychologists, councillors, social workers, and nursing staff. After a while in the waiting room, the young girl is invited by the panel and questions are put to her. She is relaxed and at ease and pleased with the way she is treated. Contrary to earlier, she feels safe and shares her story. She points out she lost trust in people, “In the past, when I was honest, people used the truth against me”, she sadly added.
After the session, we left the room; the girl and I and the social worker. “I like the people here, I’m sure they will help me”, she said.
On our way back, she was more talkative and shared more of her story. “My mum doesn’t want me, she never wanted me. The man that I thought was my biological father, was just a man, not my father. He didn’t want me either”. Her devastation silenced me. The losses of a young girl, too astonishing to comprehend. I could not fathom her loneliness. But there, behind the feisty eyes I spot a spark that resembles hope. Hope of building a life on dreams and aspirations. Of finding a home one day. Of finding tools to realize a career and a family. Of finding love that will never leave her.
I pondered the cruelty of parents, their unavailability, emotionally and physically. I considered their lives and particular circumstances. Perhaps they too were rejected, abandoned, and neglected. Perhaps not. Nothing though can ever pardon cruelty against children. Nothing can justify a child’s loss and loneliness.
What is the answer? The alternative to depravity? A Godly foundation. Faith. Education. Parental skills training. But all of that is a choice for the individual to take the turn to change. We encourage all parents who need help to contact us. We want to help you. We want to help your children.
No soul is irredeemable from the destructive patterns and cycles. There is a way out the chaos.
Wayne van Onselen, the Founder and Managing Director of Unchain Our Children coined the phrase, “Everyone is Someone’s Child”. Even as a parent, you were a child, once. And, if you are orphaned, you are God’s child. For us, each case is a life living beyond the paper file, living in the brain folds of our mind; in the heartbeats of our hope and in the steps of our feet on the journey to victory. Contact Unchain Our Children: 067 323 7116