For nearly ten years now, I’ve been visiting the local correctional facilities on a regular basis. I’ve slowly learned that if you’re going to make an honest attempt at truly caring for other people, you’re going to have to actually show up and love them through some mistakes, some rough seasons, and even some iron bars. I’m definitely a work in progress and so are they.
My wife came with me on the first few visits. We were running a community kitchen at the time in our neighborhood. It was a free and open dinner table to anyone who’d like to join us, held in a small store front church. We began with eight teenagers and a few pizzas and grew within a few years to seating and serving around a hundred human souls from literally every walk of life. It was beautiful.
There were many men who walked in right off of the street to sit down and have a home-cooked meal in the family atmosphere that God had established there. Some even parked their shopping carts full of their entire lives outside while they came inside to be served a decent meal in the safety of people who had no ill intentions towards them.
Over the years at the community kitchen, we really got to know some of the people who joined us. We sat to hear their story and how they ended up where they were. Many of them never really had a fair chance since childhood. They grew up in circumstances that would destroy any one of us mentally, physically and emotionally. Some of them ended up going back to jail in the time that we were running the community kitchen. A few of the teenagers that used to attend also ended up in some trouble and incarcerated. We followed them there to continue the caring that started at the dinner table.
In the Riverhead Correctional Facility specifically, there is a cell that the visitors wait in until they are called into the actual visiting room. You first go through a metal detector and shoe scan, then you step into a middle cell with the other visitors. When all of the visitors are scanned and inside the cell, the iron bars close and you’re inside an actual jail cell until the opposite cell gate opens to let you into the visiting room. The same thing happens after your visit before you enter the waiting room.
My wife and myself were there visiting a young man on a really busy day. It was right before Christmas, so everyone was trying to spend time with the person they loved for the holiday season. As we were exiting and standing in the middle cell waiting for the iron gate to open up and let us into the waiting room, a little girl, no more than two years of age, was next to us, being held by her mother. She suddenly realized that we were all leaving and grabbed onto the iron bars behind us and looked for her father. She started to scream, “Daddy, I want my Daddy,” as she simultaneously clung tightly to her Coco Melon doll. There wasn’t a dry eye within the sound of her cry. Maybe she knew that she was going home to celebrate Christmas without her Daddy.
When we arrived at the car my wife said, “I can’t come back here, jail ministry isn’t for me honestly.” The little girl’s cry for her Father in that middle room was absolutely soul-piercing and, I believe, completely and highly symbolic.
There is a whole generation of children and young people crying out for their Father or for a father. Their father is addicted to drugs, in and out of jail, or working a double shift once again. Maybe he never cared to know them or he’s there but not truly present in their everyday lives. Their eyes search the stands at football and basketball games to see if, by a miracle, he actually showed up to watch them play. These children are crying out for their father and some are doing it in destructive ways. Their cry is doing wheelies into oncoming traffic, drinking and smoking by the fifth grade, joining a gang, or totally withdrawn from society.
Our society needs men to step in and be inconvenienced for the neighbor’s child. We need mentors, mentorships programs, and men willing to care for kids that aren’t their own and are difficult to love initially. There is an entire generation of children crying out for their father and it can’t be silenced by mom, by their iPad, the staff in the group home, or by getting involved in the streets. Only a real Father can silence that cry.
