Children.

Sometimes I’m at a loss for words. What does a sheltered, middle-class American have to say about the state of a desolate country and it’s broken, hurting people?

Sometimes I look at the sweet faces of the students here at MITS, and I can’t imagine them living on the streets, getting high every day to mask the pain of abuse, neglect, and despair. They come to chapel everyday with smiles on their faces and sing their hearts out, you’d never know that their pasts include, rape, murder, poison, drugs, and alcohol. They tell their stories like these events are a given, not sickening situations that horrify even the most hardened individual.

These kids understand something that most of us are still struggling to comprehend…we are not our pasts. The events that happened twenty years ago, or the events that happened yesterday are not who we are today. Today, we are renewed, revived, refreshed children of God, because we are saved by the blood of Jesus Christ. That is who we are. Not the children of rape, of murderers, of drug overdoses. We are the children of a man whose blood was freely shed so that every day, we are new. That is who we are.