Brokenness doesn't fit into boxes

I work with urban youth. Youth that have the odds against them, youth that have had to lived through more evil than I know, youth that are desperate for love, for attention, youth that astound me with their resiliency, youth that have protective walls built around their hearts like mighty fortresses.
The non-profit I work for talks about how we need to quantify our positive results of our program. We need to prove with numbers the positive life change our program has created in the youth, we need to prove with numbers how we have “helped” youth in our program to be successful.

But brokenness never fits into boxes.
Brokenness never fits into numbers.
Just as life doesn’t fit into boxes either.

Life change in never linear the the outlines of a box.

Brokenness never comes out at convenient times, in convenient ways. Brokenness instead comes out when I’m dropping a girl off after programming and she tells me about her aunt who is her guardian who is an angry drunk, who smacked her the other night several times so she had to have her sister come and pick her up and take her to St. Paul for the night resulting in her missing school. It was while dropping her off at home, when I was in a hurry to get home myself on a Friday night that she shares with me that her aunt gets drink every other night.

Brokenness never fits into boxes – I have a one to one with a girl and she tells me everything is okay, everything is fine. But later that night after programming and I’m dropping her off last, upon her request, she tells me that she’s dreading thanksgiving because she has to see her mom (she lives with her aunt) who told her she had stopped drinking but she found out that was a lie when her mom called her drunk twice.

Brokenness never comes out at convenient times, in convenient ways. It comes when were having a community thanksgiving in my house with 30 people and she tells me they don’t have any food in their house, they’re not celebrating thanksgiving, and her aunt broke her leg when she fell down the stairs while she was drunk.

Brokenness doesn’t fit into boxes – easy to take care of, easy to help, easy to organize, instead brokenness is messy, spills out of boxes, seems insolvable, calls for attention when one is tired, when one doesn’t want to deal with it, when one isn’t expecting it to spill out.

But therefore, I must try to be open to the messiness, the inconvenience of it’s presence, I must try to be okay with its intrusiveness, I must try not to be overwhelmed with the lack of solutions or my inability help.

Because just as brokenness doesn’t fit into boxes, neither does anything else in life. Love doesn’t, healing doesn’t, growth doesn’t, instead love, healing, and growth seem to be present and happen in unexpected moments, at unexpected times, in ways outside of the box.