The beating had been particularly bad. One boy beat another with the intensity of a prison yard. I remember seeing venomous hate emote from a boy who was too young to know the meaning of manhood. Maybe, fearfully, he never truly would.
Some of the blood sopped up easily, and some of it took work. I pondered on this for a moment. For, though I had spent time cleaning the boy's injuries and the little sanguine trail he had left on the floor in the wake of the incident, I knew that the time spent was hardly enough for the ichory goo to harden in such a way. It was only then that I realized I was not only scouring the grate of this boy’s blood - it was that of previous and equally violent confrontations.
The boy's blood mingled with that of others.
The scarlet spots were marks, prideful insignia, of the battles won (or lost) in this particular and slightly hidden area.
This grate was one symbol among many of a life that was led here. It was the symbol of a place beset by a type of relentless cultural and geographical ether that encased these children, even as they joyfully danced and played here at the Summer kids' club.
Later in the week, I would get the chance to interact with the boy who had started the fight. He called me an asshole and promptly threw a rock at the van in which we had just courteously taken him home. And though I initially had to choke back a blind reaction to this child's ardent disrespect and violent temperament, I was actually, ultimately left overcome by his beauty. As we drove off that day, all I could see of him, in the dissipating dust of the van's tires, was the shaded silhouette of a youth lost to hopelessness; a young boy suppressed by a desperate and violent setting.
He was a child...simply a child stuck in a situation he could not understand and that he was powerless to change.
And later as I reflect on that little moment when, surrounded by the mirth of children's play, I knelt and scrubbed, I come to the realization that the grate is Red Lake. The blood on the grate, I think, revealed to me a community engaged in a brawl of a greater sort - overcoming the battles of gang life, drug addiction, lethargy, apathy, alcoholism, and the decay of spirit in every way, even in that of an eight year old.
And yet, in this, I am reminded that the light of Christ still shines out! I see His countenance in a single child’s laugh; I see it in the marked and astonishing intelligence of most four year old kids; I see it in even the small time of day that a child gets at least a little structure and love; I notice it through the experience of giving children a place of safety in a volatile community, though it only makes up a minute portion of their lives.
I am learning that Red Lake can be a dark place. Even still, even here, even amidst the darkness, when I stop to pay attention, the presence and persistence of Christ illuminates the gloom by the beauty of His making.
