“I’m tired of walking, Coach.”
This was Rokeem’s response when I asked him why he was quitting my middle school football team. Before I wrote him off as lazy, I pressed a little further and asked why he was tired.
Clamp“I walk home every day after football practice because my mom works at the Taco Bell and doesn’t get off until 11 p.m.” I told him I would take him home. He said, “OK, but I live five miles away.”
As I got to know his story, I learned that he spent four years in foster care, and returned home to his mother and six siblings in the 2nd grade. My wife taught him that year and said he was an A-B student. His 8th grade year, he had regressed to C’s and D’s. He never had a relationship with his father.
Rokeem became a part of our family over the next year. I took him home, helped him with school work, met with his teachers, and brought him to church. That year, he confessed Jesus as Lord and was baptized. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said he wanted to work in a plant. I encouraged him to think about going to college, and started calling him “Professor.”
I went with him on his first day of 9th grade and rescheduled all of his classes to take college prep classes. He spent one night a week at our house studying in order to make the grades to be eligible to go to college. He stuck it out with football and became an excellent wide receiver, winning a state championship, All-State honors, and played in the North-South All Star game.
Somewhere along the journey, I moved from coach, to mentor, to father. This past week, I had the honor of dropping off my son, Rokeem, at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he has accepted a $204,000 scholarship to play football. He will be the first from his family to go to college.
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress (James 1:27). Our communities are filled with fatherless children. Every child deserves a father. If the church doesn’t take the responsibility of reaching out to them, gang lords and drug dealers may be their only option of security. Don’t wait on them to come to the building. Go to them. You may not be able to reach all of the fatherless children in your community, but you can reach ONE. Who knows? God may use you to transform the future of a child and help them stop walking toward destruction and start running toward a new life.
I’m proud of you, Rokeem. Keep running!
– Clamp is evangelism group director for the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Follow Lee on twitter @leeclamp or on his blog at www.leeclamp.com.