10 ans (l'âge)

Are you happier than a 5th grader?
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After recently witnessing a day of emotional extremes for two 10-year-olds in my regular vacation care role, some reflections.

Like  me, both are from Asian families. Unlike me, both are boys.

Like me, both have anger management and emotional regulation issues. Unlike me, as far as I know from conversations with them, they seem without hope and without God in the world.
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I remember something of being aged 10-11 and finishing Year 5. I'd had an OK year that year. Not perfect (and in Year 4 I'd been excessively bullied most of the year at school), but I seem to remember not feeling hugely sad, or angry, or depressed very often. (Mind you, this was before Mum and Dad's marriage broke up due to selfish life choices on my Dad's part.)

And if you were my Sunday School teacher, or a Christian in the 25-40 y.o. age bracket, and if you asked me when I was in 5th grade, "How do you know you'll get into heaven if you died tonight?" I would have said confidently that Jesus' dying for me on the cross meant I was saved, forgiven, and sure of new life in heaven. Even then, though life between that time and now would prove sad, frustrating, depressing, enraging, and most of all quite honestly more unfair than many of my peers, I never wanted to die - never felt hopeless - never felt that anything could take away my joy in the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Though I understand it better now than when I was a 5th grader, Jesus was always my life and I am so thankful to God for His mercy even when I was small.
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In thinking over the issues leading, this week, to an angry, verbally abusive and physically violent argument that exploded between the two Year 5 boys I first mentioned (boys who are friends with each other, might I add), it occurred to me (not for the first time) that

- whilst both these children, not yet eleven years of age, have the same low self-esteem, the same violent temper, the same inability to manage extreme emotions in a socially appropriate way as I did even up until recently -

they are in a state of despair that God has so mercifully spared me, because He gave me parents who taught me about His love shown through Jesus.

I know they despair, one boy because I know the personal and academic pressures from his family and I can see it in his exhausted body language, and the other because he told me he hates his life, it seems so hard, and sometimes he feels he wants to kill himself. Not (according to a colleague working with me) the first time he has expressed such sentiments.

These boys need hope.
They need God.
They have neither.

At the same age as they were, I had both. And I remain, to this day, as secure in my eternal destination and purpose as I would have been in Year 5 had you asked me the "what if..?" question back then. In fact, more secure, more confident because as a 5th grader I'd barely suffered the way I see that they have, whereas now I've lived through pain.

And yet the difference is not so much an easy life or a hard life - the difference, I see so clearly, is the merciful Lordship of Jesus Christ.
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L/T.