I remember my first experience with a wild-eyed teen girl. In the late 70’s my Wheaton buddies and I started traveling to Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood to help with a fledgling church start. A sizable member of Uptown’s many ethnic groups were Appalachian. There was even a Black Lung Association office for veteran coal miners. Their children started out gorgeously blonde, but by age 20 had missing teeth and crudely penned tattoos. The youth had their own white gang. And a number of “hillbillies” as we affectionately called them, were attendees of Uptown Baptist Church. We would pick them up for Sunday School in our Wheaton ministry van.
A few of us were in the Wheaton van, with a smallish, wild-eyed white girl sitting next to me, about age 14 or 15. The kids were acting up, getting loud. When I requested her to settle down, she screamed in my ear, staring defiantly. I decided in my 19-year-old helplessness that youth ministry wasn’t my thing.
For several years Prang had been telling me about a girl she was concerned about in her home village. Bpan’s family was poor and broken, and a stepfather had had his way with her, a sadly common occurrence among the rural lower class. Bpan had then fallen into promiscuity, going from one boyfriend to the next. Prang was doing her best to befriend, spend time, and take Bpan to church. Now, with Bpan 15 and as lost as ever, Prang was wondering if she might be a candidate for the teen-girl program we’re helping to launch. So she introduced me to Bpan on a video call, and I started chatting with her on Messenger.
Bpan’s texts were simple but often. “Dad, what are you doing?” “Have you eaten yet?” (That’s the Thai way of saying “How are you?”) Her answers to my questions were equally short. “Lying down.” “Sitting with some friends.” We weren’t getting anywhere, so I suggested we do a video call , to which she readily agreed.
This morning a message came, “Dad when are you going to call me?” She added a couple of heart emojis. So I hit the video call button.
She answered immediately, greeted me with a brief smile, then immediately went blank, and stared off screen. Wild eyes. Had I no idea of her history I would have wondered about autism spectrum. I asked the usual questions: had she eaten yet (no), who was she living with (her dad’s house, but wouldn’t say who all lived there), how many siblings (an older and younger brother), are you good at school (no). etc. I asked what she did every day (no answer). Her stepdad poked his head in momentarily, as if half-interested.
Bpan is pretty and petite, with fine features including a small mouth, and her light skin and high round forehead indicate foreign DNA. For someone in her context, beauty is a terrible liability, because it garners attention but is readily discarded. I once read an article in Psychology Today that belatedly questioned contemporary sexual morality, or lack thereof. Ask a man how many women he knows that he’d like to sleep with and he’ll give you a list, the writer noted. How many would he like to marry? One, maybe two. I’m sure Bpan is on quite a few lists of the first kind, both to-do and done. As far as the second, her obviously severe attachment disorder precludes any chance at a long-term relationship.
She lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly, still staring away from her phone camera. I was beginning to run out of questions. “Do you have any questions for me?” I asked, expecting a no. I was right.
I sometimes try to imagine my consciousness had I been born into ignorance. I find it no more imaginable than a new color. Education and experience forms us in ways that are perhaps only fully appreciated when we see life in their absence. Bpan’s knowledge of the world, I am certain, could be well described in a page or two.
Yet there she was, a precious image of the Creator, wild eyes looking off screen left, small mouth in a pout, smoke emanating from her nostrils. Nearly five decades later, wild eyes intrigue and move me to find answers and get more help, more laborers, for kids like Bpan. Her type of psyche is lived out in countless others around the planet. Orphans and widows.
One of the most striking examples of Western individualistic Christianity is our use of Isaiah 1:18 to illustrate forgiveness:
“Come now let us settle the matter,”
says YHWH.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.”
It’s a nice picture. I learned it as a kid. But the fact that we have allowed it to be split off from the preceding section, especially v. 17, is lamentable at best, abominable at worst:
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow
Sure, God wants to forgive us. But he doesn’t give salvation by grace so we don’t have to do anything. Quite the opposite. Read Romans 6. Here he says, “Let’s fix this. I’m sick and tired of your playing church while ignoring people in need. But I’m happy to forgive. Just do what I say.”
But this type of obedience, working for the traumatized helpless, is hard. Really hard. You can’t do it without deep passion and persistence. A message we have repeated often is that rescuing those at risk of exploitation is far from the movie endings that we may imagine. And while we study the growing body of knowledge about trauma and the brain, it is clear that a quick cure simply isn’t going to be found. Repeated developmental trauma hardwires the brain for survival rather than connection, and those survival behaviors cause more trauma. Hurt people hurt people, especially themselves. The only way to help is simple but challenging: long-term connection with a safe, loving person who has learned to see through the wall of self-absorption and protection to the immeasurably beautiful imago dei, and persistently leads the broken one, again and again, into the safe arms of Jesus.