Skip to main content

Giving it to God (Or: The Truth in the Trite)

I'm hoping by writing this post, I'll be able to sleep tonight instead of staying awake worrying, which is what I do.

I'm worried about this family that I'm working with. The mom is doing so well - she's doing so much work (that is overdue, but better late than never) on repairing her relationship with her oldest child now living with her and on taking steps to get her papers to be legal in the US, to try and work out her kids' welfare benefits, to get her children's health and education taken care of, everything. And it's so much work.

She wants to work (she cleans houses) and can't find any work. None. I've tried and continue to try (she's a really good housecleaner!) but no one's paying for that right now. The promised welfare benefits are not coming and the social worker will not return calls. We've enlisted the help of a welfare lawyer, but that's going to take time. And time is what this family does not have right now.

Through the generosity of many friends and acquaintances as well as my church, the family's rent is paid through August 31. The social worker said that the benefits would be straightened out by then, giving her more money to work with, but that was before the social worker dropped off the face of the earth. Also, the mom was hoping to have work by then - and there's been no lack of trying - but that hasn't worked either. So the money runs out on August 31 and there's nowhere for them to live.

I want to fix this. They're a good family who are trying hard to make it and fix past mistakes and have had a lot of unfair obstacles in their way. But I can't. I can help them look for apartments, but she has no credit score. And even if they find an apartment, it will be a minimum of first month's rent and deposit, which will be $1600 at absolute minimum. I wish I had an extra $1600. But I don't.

I've done everything I can and this is where I have to give it to God, as trite as that sounds. There's a passage in the Bible (maybe in Isaiah?) where God says, "I am God and apart from me there is no Savior." If I believe that, it's time to believe it. God has provided so far - through my friends and family and church and random connections... and I have to believe God won't abandon this family now.

But I am not good at faith.

If you pray, please pray for a miracle for this family. If you don't pray - try it. no one will ever know and it certainly can't hurt. Thanks.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stuffed Animals

There are several much more serious stories I was going to share, but I'm not in the mood to be made sad tonight, so I'll tell you all about the stuffed animals.  This is a post that needs images so someday when I have or borrow a working scanner, I will add the photos. A few years into teaching, I joined Freecyle.  For those of you who don't know Freecycle, it's a group of people in any given community who are on an email list to get rid of their old stuff and get stuff from other people.  It's a fabulous form of recycling. Somebody posted that they had a huge bag of stuffed animals in good condition to give away and I decided to grab it for my class. I thought that some of the kids would like the stuffed animals, but I certainly didn't think they'd all be into them.  Kids grow up really fast in that neighborhood, and when you have six-year olds talking about how they walk to school alone because their parents say they're "grown," and how
1 comment
Read more

A New Prison, Part Two

  Second very long part of the prison visit report.   After we got all the paperwork filled out and went through the metal detector, we got visitation slips with the name of the inmate, and made our way over to the other building for visitation. This is not maximum security so thankfully you can just sit next to the inmates, and not be separated by glass or have to use a telephone to talk.    First, you get a gate unlocked and go into a holding pen that is of course in direct sunlight (or rain if it's that season) and surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. You wait there until the gate at the other end is unlocked. This holding pen was a little bigger and less claustrophobic than the other prison (I do not have any claustrophobia and I came very close to a panic attack once at the other place) and they opened the other gate more quickly. Then you walk, again in blazing sunlight (or rain) to the visitation building. This one was less of a walk than the other prison but I still
Post a Comment
Read more

A Loss

  (I have been putting off finishing this blog post for months. You'll see why)  Today, I was cleaning a bookshelf and I found the journal from one of my third-grade students, who I call Fred in my book , in 2001. I still had it because he didn't come to the last day of school to get his stuff this year and I guess it got put in a pile and somehow I've kept it with me.  He didn't come to the last day of school, probably because his family was a mess: dad in prison, mom in an abusive relationship, all the kids (understandably) acting out violently. Fred was expelled from our school in second grade for hitting a teacher. Then he was expelled from the other school, I don't know why, at the end of second grade. He came back on the condition from the administration that he be in my class because I had him as a student in first grade and he listened to me and worked well with me.  We had a really good relationship, although Fred was definitely not easy to have in class.
Post a Comment
Read more