He hath turn'd a heaven unto hell.

Yesterday at the group home I was sitting with one of the kids and she said to me, "I don't believe in hell. I think if you've been bad and you die you have to come back to earth and live again." She's twelve years old and yesterday for Mother's Day she went into the city and scattered the ashes of her mother who was a prostitute and died of cancer last year.
A couple of weeks ago I was tucking her into bed and we were talking about her new bike and bright red helmet and home and moving, and she said, "I've lived in twenty-five houses in three years, and that doesn't count foster houses." I've begun to notice how none of the kids here talk with any sense of artifice or pity when they tell their stories. They recite facts.

We lived in a tent.
She left me five times.
They...
They...
I hate her.

This kid at the house, the one who thinks earth is hell, asked me to bless her before bed one night, but I didn't know what to do, so she told me, "Take your thumb and put a cross on my head and ask God to bless me," and so I did. And so I do.
It's been a year since I started working with them, and it's no surprise to me that I've learned things from them. I knew from the start that they would understand certain truths I never could, but what does surprise me is the sense of responsibility they've filled me with. From the moment their first cells divided and divided and divided, and began to form their tiny hearts with their soft and quick lub-dubs, life has set its face against them in creatively cruel and disgusting ways, and at the end of the day, the end of my rope, the end of my faith, I am left with the feeling that I need to hold on to God for them.
Thirty years of a narcissistic faith flew out the window, the doors, up the chimney, out my eyes, and fingers, and skin the first time I read a case history of one of the kids here. And I realized with such clarity that I could not afford a lukewarm, who the hell really knows, spoiled child crying for an ice lolly kind of faith. There is no time on earth for any of it, but only for love, and hope, and faith, and doubt, and confusion, and anger, and all and each with a stubborn sincerity that digs in and works at finding God in all things, for all things and despite all things. Mostly, despite all things.
Those poor, crazy, broken little squirts have less than nothing, and I'll be damned, so truly damned, if I take the hope and truth of God's love from them by the way in which I live.