Robyn

Have I ever told you why I became a children’s worker? Why working with kids on the fringes became my passion?

It was my first summer working at a camp…12 years ago this June.  I ventured out halfway across Canada with my sisters and cousin as we dared to try something new and find out what really was so great about giving up our whole summer to live and work on camp.

There were a great many experiences that summer and I cherish a lot that I learnt and the people that I met. But one memory sticks out….one moment and conversation with a child…her name was Robyn.

She’d be struggling for the first few days, causing a few difficulties, and eventually I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk and have a jump on the trampoline as she wasn’t doing well with whatever program they were meant to be at that moment. As she jumped on the trampoline, the 17 year old version of myself actually had the wisdom to ask all the right questions. Eventually Robyn just spilled it all.

Turned out she hated herself, as with having short hair and being a bit of a tomboy, she always got mistaken for a boy. She was also living in a really bad environment, got abused regularly and had gone through some horrific abuse that at that point in my life, I couldn’t fathom any little girl could be put through. I think I may have very well been the first person to look her in the eye, tell her she was worth something and that she in fact didn’t deserve anything she had been through. The conversation ended with me promising to send her a postcard from Toronto when I went home at the end of the summer, as she had never received a postcard before.

I remember being surprised at how well I had done in the conversation with Robyn and how I had been able to keep my emotions in check despite how shocked I had been by what she had shared with me. Later that night, after all the kids had gone to sleep, I remember sharing what had happened with the head cabin leader. When she asked if I was okay and gave me a hug, I began to sob uncontrollably into her shoulder. She told me that these things are never easy to hear for the first time…but that we should never become so used to hearing them that we forget how horrible and unfair the injustice of all of it is.

I have met literally hundreds of kids that I have come along side, had conversations with, and journeyed with for both short and longer periods of time, since this conversation 12 years ago. But that was the moment that I knew God had called me to work with the Robyn’s of this world…to come along side and be a voice to the children who no one was listening to and to do everything I could to make their lives safe.

I did send a postcard to Robyn when I got home to Toronto that summer, but the address I was given to write to couldn’t be completely guaranteed that that’s where she was still living. I mailed it anyways.  I guess more then anything, it was a symbolic gesture asking that wherever this little girl ended up, I was going to have to trust that God would have her back.

So…I suppose these things are supposed to end with a morale or a lesson of some sort.  I guess it’s just this…sometimes serving just flat out sucks. Helping isn’t easy…giving to others hurts, and will always cost something from us in return.

But it definitely helps to remember the why.