I don’t know if are ready to acknowledge it not, but it is a plague. An ever increasing number of kids are being turned out into the streets to fend for themselves. My friends Benny and Niki Nowell lead a ministry that serves teens and young adults who are homeless in Boulder, CO. That part of Colorado seems to be a magnet for troubled and homeless young people. Everyday they serve kids who are living and sleeping on the streets as well as those who bounce from couch to couch, but really have no place to call home. Drug abuse is a significant factor in these kids’ lives. They are of course easy targets for human traffickers and others who prey on the most vulnerable among us. I hope to travel to Boulder soon to spend some time with the Nowell’s. The kind of ministry they do appeals to me. I have found in recent weeks however that I am getting my share of experience right here in our own little bedroom community to Ft. Worth.

A school administrator shared with a meeting of ministers from Granbury that there a handful of kids right here in our own community who have no place to call home. They too move from house to house looking for a warm place to sleep and take a shower. That same administrator called me a couple of weeks ago regarding a young man who only had one pair of badly worn jeans to wear to school.

In my work with law enforcement agencies here, I have seen several teen runaway cases recently. And then not too long ago I worked with some officers on a situation involving some underage girls who were seemingly involved in prostitution. They were homeless girls from another state who had nowhere to go and no one to turn to for help. When I asked them about their parents, they indicated that there was no parental relationship intact. Our church recently reached out to a young man who was sleeping outside in various locations around town. I don’t have any easy solutions to this ongoing plague. I can’t share many details about any of these situations, because of the need for confidentiality. But I can say that the kinds of scenarios I am describing are becoming far more commonplace. They are by no means confined to large cities either. What is the answer?

I don’t have any simple solutions. Really to be honest I don’t have any solutions at all. I am frustrated with parents who are not responsible. That is a common theme. Most of these kids have been abused, neglected, and ultimately abandoned by the adults in their lives. Accountability has to enter the picture somewhere. But what about the status of these young people in the meantime? My hunch is that responsible adults are going to have to reach out to these kids one person at a time. We may have to quite literally take a child in and treat him as one of our own. It works. All of us are going to have to pool our resources, our ideas, and a huge dose of streetwise compassion to formulate creative ways of addressing this growing plague. Maybe I need to go see Benny and Niki sooner than later! By the way, their web address is: www.sevensonline.org