Recently in Guatemala I was blindsided when I met José*. I'd gone with my colleagues from Bible Society to a government-run shelter for children just outside Guatemala City.
All 800 boys and girls in the shelter are in some way wards of the state. Some are orphans, some have special educational needs and some have been rescued from gangs – nine year-olds given a gun and told to kill.
Guatemala is a nation of stunning natural beauty and of startling social contrasts. As it continues its slow recovery from a 36-year civil war, signs of growing prosperity like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Honda dealerships jar with widespread child malnourishment and a murder rate that puts it in the global top five. In Guatemala City, gang-controlled 'Red Zones' nestle alongside shopping malls and middle-class residential neighbourhoods which wouldn't look out of place in Glasgow or Gloucester.
So, as I stood in the shelter's assembly hall, stumbling through a short talk about David the Shepherd boy, at a gathering organised by the Bible Society volunteers, I was increasingly aware of my own inadequacy to connect with the 50 boys sitting attentively before me; boys who had known more hardship in their short lives than I and everyone I know combined.
After I'd finished speaking a young man, José, asked to speak with me privately. As we withdrew to a corner I asked, via translation, what was on his mind. Immediately his face, which had been a hard and expressionless mask, crumpled as the tears rolled down. Between sobs, José told us that when he was a young boy, he was abandoned by his parents and taken in by his aunt. Not long afterwards, his aunt also abandoned him and he was taken, aged 11, to the government shelter. In the intervening years he has never been visited by a family member. Not once. This is the same experience as 80 per cent of the children in the shelter. It's only through the regular pastoral visits of the volunteers – some of them ex-gang members – and their message of love that José knows there is any hope at all for him in the outside world.
Today, aged 17, approaching his birthday and official adulthood, he is facing up to the prospect of having to leave the shelter and create a life for himself beyond the familiar walls. And he was terrified. He was preparing to leave the only home he'd ever known, for a world that has, in the experience of his short life, totally rejected him. I can't begin to imagine the fear, the isolation.
In 1997, when the columnist Mary Schmich wrote her column Wear Sunscreen in the Chicago Tribune it became a viral sensation. Her words so struck a chord that when Baz Luhrmann turned them into an ambient dance track, it became a number 1 hit in several countries. It contained great nuggets of advice, like: Don't mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85; and of course, wear sunscreen. The stanza below has always particularly struck me:
Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind.
The kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday
But the reality was, as I stood with José in the concrete yard of an institution full of forgotten children, that Schmich's words on their own, however valiant in sentiment and however beautifully-crafted, had a hollow ring.
And yet there's another famous passage that exhorts us not to worry. In the Gospels, Matthew records Jesus saying: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?" (Matthew 6:25-27).
These words took on a new meaning for me that day. These powerful, life-affirming words, taken by dedicated Bible Society volunteers into the shelter every week without fail to these marginalised children. What a different story they tell!
And they really are fundamentally different from Schmich's poignant soliloquy. Because we are in the hands of God himself. God who broke into our world as a helpless baby, born with the hint of human disgrace hanging over his head; the child of refugees, hunted by the authorities, raised in poverty and persecuted for bringing a message of mercy and love.
I and the volunteers were able to remind José of some of this. Where my words failed me, God's words were enough. As we wept together, I was able to remind José of God's promise to Jeremiah, that "before I formed you in the womb I knew you", of the words of the Psalmist that he was "fearfully, and wonderfully made". And I was able to share those other words God gave to Jeremiah: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."
David Smith is head of international programmes at Bible Society. Follow him on Twitter. Some names have been changed.
