Ministering to Our Younger Inner-City Sisters
By Violet T. Barry

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As a mighty woman of God many people are looking to you to see how you are truly living. A lot of times as women, we are planting seeds for our other sisters without even knowing that we did. No matter where you go, people are observing you whether it’s while you are out and about running errands in the streets, attending classes, on the job or interacting with your family, church and community.

There is a young lady that I met during the 2005 holiday season because of a request made from another Sister-in-Christ who said that a lot of the women at the church had tried to minister to this young person but no matter what way they tried to come at her, she kept saying that none of them could possibly understand her plight and therefore had nothing that she wanted to hear. This young person was fifteen at the time that we met. She had dropped out of school and ran away from home many times before. In fact, she hit the streets the day after she spent nearly 24 hours with me just chilling. I was originally suppose to take her out for lunch and conversation but God’s plan unfolded from the moment I picked her up until late that very night before we parted. God uses us as seed planters even when we don’t realize that he’s using us to tend to the harvest.

You see, I thought I had the game on lock when it came to being a female having grown up in the inner-city and knowing that everything is do or die when you find yourself with your back up against the wall. My younger Sister-In-Christ had ran away to live in a projects style housing situation with an older man and his parents. The folks that were in her immediate support network were also minors who encouraged her to live a life on the run from her family and to move around nomadically. Since these folks wanted to be grown and believe that they were able to act grown, they started doing what they believed were grown folks things. My little sis was smoking weed, drinking, taking ecstasy pills and more. She was hanging with some thugged out, already pregnant pre-teens who also had no place to call a home. While she was in the midst of her own struggles, she lost herself in the struggles of others which kept her from having to examine self.

As women, this should ring a bell in our head. How many of us were trained to forget about self and tend to the needs and cares of others before self? We may not have straightforwardly learned this from someone telling us to do so but we learned by watching the various female figures that we came across in our lives whether at home or in our immediate environment. God wants us to have an attitude of stewardship but he does not condone us having a foolish spirit or to tolerate foolish things or to be taken advantage of by ill people. In the inner-city how many of us have watched women tend to no good men and take the position of being submissive to the wrong man who is neither their husband through marriage and also does not have a personal relationship with the Lord or has the Lord as the head of his life? How many of us know of “Christian” people in the church who are fornicating in adulterous relationships with one another and even shacking up and raising kids together under the same roof and yet serve as some kind of elder or position in clergy at the church? What kind of messages are we sending to little girls?

Back to my little sister-in-Christ, one night she accidentally called me at one something in the morning thinking she was returning the call of one of her little hoodrat friends. She had crept back to her father’s house in the late night hours and brought a friend with her who the father agreed to allow the friend and her baby to live with him if that would keep his baby girl at home. When she realized who she was talking to on the phone, my little sister-in-Christ got flip with me and told me not to worry about her that she would be okay.

Now anybody who was raised old skool knows that there are just certain things an older person ain’t going to tolerate from a child. Obviously the next move after being awoken out of my sleep and having a minor get flip with me at one something in the morning was to put the all black on and haul tail on over to her crib. So I get there, immediately in the spirit I recognize the presence of someone she does not need to be dealing with and obviously that person was able to detect that I was not feeling their presence. I spoke to my little sister, pleaded with her, testified to her about what the Lord had brought me out of, listened to her tell me that she does not know about this God that everyone calls on and refers to and if he existed her life would not be the way that it is.

Eventually we ended up outside on the street having an emotional no hold bars discussion at two in the morning. I prayed that the Lord would send me a word for her that would deposit a different desire in her soul. I had to break away from the proper Christian jargon and get deeper with her by giving to her my life as raw and uncut as possible. She told me how she did not care if she contracted or died of aids from having sex with different men and how she really did not think she was going to live much longer and did not desire to either way. That broke my spirit. Here I am looking at what could be a mirror reflection of me when I was her age, along with, so many other girls in the struggle to survive in the inner-city. I left that night, having to give her advice that I realized would be important to empower her to move in a more positive direction than where she was heading.

Sometimes when the Lord sends you to minister to others, it might not be in the capacity or the way that you think it’s suppose to be. Nobody wants someone to come into their life to judge them or tell them how wrong they are and point out all of the things that is jacked up about them. What people truly want is someone they can relate to and who can give them real advice no holds bar style.

About a month or two later, my little sister found me and told me that she wanted me to know that she took my advice and decided to take real control over her life and she got on the grind and started doing exactly that. She re-enrolled into a technical training independent learning school and she even joined extra-curricular activities, as well as, started job searching for a part-time job to make her on ends. Not only that, she told me that because of that one day that I spent with her last year, helped set an example of the kind of woman she wanted to be as she matured.

We found common ground because we were both very much the tomboy and unlike a lot of the more frilly sisters walking around trying to subdue a brother, I was comfortable being a woman in my own skin, in my own style, and with my own distinct personality. I can still be feminine without showing all of my personal business and I can still be a lady even though I like enjoy (Christian) rap music. A lot of these younger girls think that because they enjoy rap music or wearing jeans and t-shirts that other women can not relate to them. A lot of times these girls are also gravitating to this mentality because they do not and did not have a positive female role model in their life. Girls are hurting from the loss of a positive female role model, the same as, boys who are lacking positive male role models in their lives.

These girls, just like our young men, feel alienated or think that they are an outcast in the environment that they live in so they purposefully go out of their way to express themselves in any manner that they seem fit. What are societal norms and rules of engagement to a group of people who could care less and believe that the rules that everybody else lives their life by doesn’t apply to them?

When you come across a younger person who tells you that you can not relate to her, instead of arguing that you can, ask her why? Give her the opportunity to get everything she’s thinking and feeling about herself and her life out into the open so that you can get a feel for where she’s coming from and determine whether or not there really isn’t any common ground between the two of you. Don’t interrupt when she’s trying to explain herself and her views and never try to take away from her by making it seem like what she is going through is just some sort of phase.

Young people are much more independent and keen than when you were their age so never try to underestimate a younger sister or brother or dismiss them from knowing anything about life. If you can manage to do these things, I can almost assure you that eventually you will find common ground that can become your focal point on building a positive relationship with that young person.

Violet T. Barry is the President of Holy Jamz, the Leading Voice for Today's Young and Urban Christian Community.
 

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