My Eyes Tell it All

From a recent visit with a young lady at a youth detention facility. July 2009
She walks in. An abrupt hi is the answer to my greeting. She looks lost and cornered in. I look into her face when she sits down and I immediately notice her eyes.
They say that the eyes are the window of the soul and I believe that it is so. The eyes tell all. In this particular young woman, I had to almost look away because there was just so much hurt, bitterness, hate, and sadness in them.
When I ask her how strong is her faith in God on a scale of weak, medium, or strong, this young woman, answered medium, but added, "I''m about to lose it." Years of abuse, neglect, failure, and making the wrong choices in life brought her to this place. She is a young mother locked up awaiting placement in a foster home and not knowing if she will see her baby again. She is a daughter who's parents refuse to visit her even on court dates. She has a weak perception of who God trully is even though she sat in church pews and prayed earnestly. When the topic of prayer came up she told me that before her prayers were answered, but now even though she prays, God doesn't answer her prayers. Everything has been getting worse and worse. Then her eyes mist over with tears and she looks defeated. She tries to change her ways, but she keeps on repeating her mistakes over and over!
She admits that while she's locked up, she reads the bible more often as well as prays but when she's on the "outs" she does neither.
God cannot be like a light switch which you turn on and off she tells me (she tells ME!) and I nod a yes.
But yet she doesn't see this getting better is what I see her eyes saying silently.
Such hopelessness and yet there is a solution to all her problems that is just a fingertip away!
And that is God alone...
If you desire a relationship with someone, you get to know them from head to toe to interests, to likes and dislikes...
You desire to talk with them all the time. You desire their presence near you constantly. You continuously seek them...and when you stumble and fall knee deep into a muddy pit, you cry out for that person that you trust and hold dear. It is only Jesus.
God washes away the mud, the scars, aches, and webs of sins from our heart and then we walk with Him by faith, and only by faith.
To get to know God and to trully seek Him is when you will see faith grow and soar ever higher. You will have to endure times when faith is tested...to the limit, but it will show the honesty of your heart and how much you really love Jesus. Is it with all your being or 3/4 of it?
With these words I ask God to give this young lady hope and continuous zeal to seek the Truth. I ask God to bless her and to give her strength. Finally, I ask Him to give her one more chance and that she may once again be able to hold her little baby in her arms. She walks out of the room but I still have a picture of those eyes that continuosly remind me to continue praying and giving hope to the hundreds of other young women incarcerated and lost...
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you...Matthew 7:7

She is running

A hundred miles an hour

in the wrong direction

She is trying

But the canyon's ever widening

In the depths of her cold heart

So she sets out on another misadventure just to find

She's another two years older

And she's three more steps behind

Does anybody hear her?

Can anybody see?

Or does anybody even know she's going down today

Under the shadow of our steeple

With all the lost and lonely people

Searching for the hope that's tucked away in you and me

Does anybody hear her? Can anybody see?

- Casting Crowns lyrics