First Aid

Boa tarde!


      When teaching or coaching any sport, the worst thing that you can have happen is seeing someone under your tutelage injured. I have been injured many times from torn labrums to split lips and black eyes. I have also accidentally injured training partners. These are difficult to deal with, but when a kid is hurt in your class, a tournament, or worst of all in the street, it is almost unbearable. It is hard not to somehow feel responsable whether it is your fault or not.

      Last week, the kids in my BJJ class were working on rolling armbars from the back. They were all working hard and performing the technique well. However, they got loud, and a girl working with her younger brother balled up crying. He could not here her saying tap. For whatever reason he could not feel her tapping either. Her whole arm was swollen, and I spent the next two hours waiting for her mom to come take her. I thought it was going to be the first time I had a kid sent to the hospital. She couldn't move her arm or her hand. It hurt to keep ice on it. I thought is was broken for sure.

      Her mom came for her, and she decided to take her home and see if it would improve by morning. The next day they went to the doctor, and it was thankfully just a sprain. She was back in class two days later, albeit just to watch for the sake of precaution. It was a huge relief to find that it wasn't too serious. In the end we have to understand the risks of combat sports.

      Even harder though are the risks of working in violence-prone urban poverty. Here I have seen a young man walk into class with a stab wound in the thigh in both Managua and East St. Louis. I have seen my most promising and talented kid kicked out of his house and sleeping in the Street night to night. The last time I ever saw him, he was consumed by drug addiction and covered with scars like ladders running up his arms and legs. He was thirteen when all of this happened. I have had to carry an 11-year-old's casket. I have had a good friend jailed and tortured by an oppressive government after a peaceful protest. He now lives in another country where has to sleep on the floor. I here news of kids I used to know who have been shot to death. I even saw a young man who had been held down by gang rivals to a gang he had left while they cut a chunk out of his calf muscle with a knife. The wound seemed to stare right back at me with the swollen, pink, rotting flesh surrounding the infected hole, like a gaping pupil that had witnessed an ugliness nastier tan its own appearance.

       These images wound your soul. This job is overwhelming at times. For the most part it is joy and triumph. The failures can really cut you though. But if you don't take it on, who will? Is it certain that someone else will take your place in their lives? No. God puts us in people's lives for a reason. In Him there is hope, and with Him we can do the impossible.

       The director at the community center here once said that the most tenacious seed of all is the Kingdom of God seed. You might never see its fruit, but then again its not for your glory. He will keep cultivating the seeds we plant. We just need to have faith. We need to keep sharing His love. These things I see are the results of wounds that go back for generations. Yet God's love brings healing to the most profound brokenness.

       While these heavy memories began to weigh me down one day this last week, I walked into the center. I thought about giving up. God reminded me of why I needed to keep going. I saw the hardest kid I have ever had to deal with. He is a Young man now. He is stuck in drugs. He is jobless, and he has not kept up with school. He tells me about his buddies who are getting shot. But he is alive, and I still get to speak to him. He keeps coming back after the years, and I have an opportunity to bring first aid to his soul through the Gospel. It is the hardest path to travel sometimes, but no other race is worth running.

Modimo au gaugele.