Heaviness

I just did some door-to-door inviting for Saturday's Harvest Carnival.  It's always good for my soul to connect eye-to-eye with people and get a feel for what's going on the neighborhood.  This time around, the short 30 minutes of canvassing left my heart feeling heavy.  There were a lot of hard things to process in a short amount of time. 

So, rather than writing about stories of success and transformation like I said I was going to do in my last post, I am instead asking for you to pray for a few of the hard situations I encountered today:

1.  Please pray for the precious four-year-old boy, "G," who is being neglected.  I called CPS this afternoon to file a report which is never a fun thing to do. 

2.  Please pray for the addicted mom who asked to borrow my phone today so she could have someone bring her more drugs.  Pray also for her daughters.  When I asked her how they were doing, she told me that they'd be taken out of her custody.  I can only imagine what they are going through.   

3.  Please pray for "L," a young man who is steeped in "thug life."  I've known "L" since he was 13.  He burrowed his way into my heart back then and has held a special place there ever since.  I SO wanted him to make good choices for his life, but instead he's chosen paths of destruction.  He moved out of the neighborhood a few years ago but every now and then he reappears, like he did today, most likely to make a drug transaction in the neighborhood.  Whenever I see him, we smile, exchange pleasantries, and then I always walk away with a deep sadness.