"Something Significant" by Dan Kruger

There is something significant happening here. Society as a whole has given up on them. However there is one thing that keeps them alive. Hope. Different than the rest of the world, the hope is not for a better day, but for a new tomorrow. Hope for a change to happen, not to better themselves, but to impact others. Money, programs, and correction centers all fall short of the one thing that makes the difference, relationships filled with love, concern, discipline, and growth. There is something far greater than people moving into the inner-city. There is a movement beyond people moving into Binghampton. There is a movement of love and serving others that you rarely receive outside of the closeness of an urban community. Where else can you sit on your front porch and see generations and generations of family come only to sit and talk to their Auntie? Where else does your physically stricken neighbor come to you and offer you a flower out of her garden as a mother's day present? Where else does your neighbor come over to build you up when everything is going down and tell you that she will bake you a cake for the open house party when it finally happens? There is something special when desire, love, and compassion are put together to build and make a difference in a community.

While each relationship impacts the community, I have come to understand this past year that the most pressing need in our neighborhood is the need for more godly men to mentor young boys. Our neighborhood is driven by pride, selfishness, arrogance, fear; all aspects that only cripple a community. The biggest problem is that in our society today young black males rarely get to share in the hope that everyone else has. The collaboration of lifestyle, image, and pressures has molded inner-city males into a robotic organism programmed for failure. This molding needs to be stopped. Until they are able to see a reachable goal modeled to them, with different alternatives to their lifestyle than living a thuggish-hustling lifestyle, there will be no change. Yet, there is hope, but we have to show them at hope is real and possible to reach. It won’t happen easily, which is why a relationship is needed to walk alongside them as they struggle and stumble, eventually, into a hope they can grasp in their own lives.

May 2008