After an eventful day we were hoping Sunday night would be a time to relax. My day started early. At 6 AM I was assembling a big grill that would cook hundreds of hotdogs at the 2nd annual outdoor church service in our neighborhood. It was a great day but by late afternoon when we got home we were so tired I hoped no one would knock at our door so we could just rest. When Michele told me one girl was going to hang out with us for a while it was for a very good reason. Her older sister had run away, again, a few days earlier but they found her and she agreed to go to a center for troubled teens. Our friend had now found out her sister was suicidal. This girl is usually jubilant and a strong leader but at our home she went hours without speaking a word. We didn’t have a lot of wisdom so Michele just kept her close, asked questions and loved her as a sister would. The girl seemed to feel protected and loved just by being near Michele. Then as it started getting dark a couple of 12 year old girls came to our side gate screaming “Help! It’s an emergency!” Two Hispanic men were chasing them, trying to forcibly take them back to their duplex a few houses down from us. We later learned from the police that in Mexico it is common for men to take 12/13 year old girls and keep them until they turn 18 then marry them. The girls were hysterical. Crying and screaming they told me their story of running from these guys but they had no place to go so they came to our home. I wanted desperately to fix the situation but I called 911 instead because only the police could do that. By the time the officers arrived there was about 20 African-Americans in the middle of the street (and one white guy – me) who were very concerned about the situation. The crowd was getting restless and started making their way toward the small duplex where these guys live. Had the police officers not done such a tremendous job there is a good chance a race riot could have broken out on our street. These tragic situations are well beyond any training Michele and I have had. It would be easy to be too fearful to get involved but as the Bible says, “God does not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7). With no experience in helping a girl deal with a sibling’s suicidal tendencies or girls who narrowly escaped abduction we just were there to talk to them, hug them and help them communicate with their families. Sometimes being there is enough.Two days removed from that night and I am feeling sad about how little our city seems to care about problems in the black community. I am not a fan of the local news but tonight I watched the late news and was wondering why something like an arrest being made over the attempted kidnapping of two young girls would not make the news. I’m pretty sure the reason is because we are in a poor black community. That’s probably why the four year old boy that was killed by a hit-and-run driver never made the news and why no one outside our neighborhood never heard of the man who was shot on the steps of a church a block from our home. I told Michele a year ago that if things like the little boy being killed happened in a nicer part area every TV station in town would cover. I was thinking about that as the news anchor was relaying the day’s biggest stories and there it was…. It came on just after the picture of a bank robbery in action. A story came up from one of the nicest areas of town and for the life of me I can’t understand why it could ever make the news of even a small city. The bullet points read: Franklin Public Library
- 2 Laptops Missing
- Toilets Filled With Paper Towels.
That’s the kind of story that’s not big enough for the conversation at the local hair salons but it made the TV news in America’s 29th largest media market while on a daily basis real tragedy goes unnoticed among the city’s poor. They are forgotten… and they know it.
