through Ryan’s eyes

I’ve been working with a lot of kids because I’ve been tutoring all day, and then doing kids club at night. So I’ve been around a lot of kids. Many of them are so open to you. Just getting to know them is so easy, and it’s amazing the kind of stuff that they know how to do best. What they can do, what kind of person they are continues to surprise me. Example: today, we did two classes back-to-back with two different groups. One kid I was tutoring was okay with a math worksheet we were doing. Another kid sits down – yesterday he barely talked to me, and he looks at the first problem. I didn’t even say anything and he tells me the answer. I was like, “what, you knew that?!” and very surprised. He was like, “yeah” and just knew the answer. He gives me all the correct answers to the other ones. Stuff like that.

I was talking with some kids my age at the apartments where we’re doing kids club. I noticed one of them hanging around and I started talking to him. Turns out he’s from Kenya and he moved to St. Louis like a month ago. We were just talking about his story – he was a great guy. Name is Zacaria. A couple of his friends joined him, Muhammed and Michele. Not sure where Michele was from, but knows like six languages because he said he wasn’t sure where he would be going, like France or Germany or here. And he ended up here. He had traveled to France, he had traveled all over Europe. And he was just telling me about how different it is coming here to America. But he said, “I still like it”. If I had never taken that uncomfortable little step of talking with these guys, I would never have gotten to know their story. For me, I know how valued I feel when someone is genuinely curious about who I am, what I have to say, so God just continues to show himself to me through the people around me. And just how unique everyone is and how loved we all are.