Tired, frustrated, annoyed

When I arrived at Romsey Mill for my weekly reminder of life on the edge I was greeted by Gavin and Ruth complaining that I hadn't blogged about my work there for ages. Little did we realise how much material the afternoon's events would give us.

With the late afternoons becoming lighter it's now possible to take our group of Year 9's out to do something constructive, after a winter of being cooped up playing Wii Sports, Murderball and badminton. With a recent grant being made to the Mill we are able to continue work with Anglesey Abbey, a nearby National Trust property.

However, we nearly didn't get there. The minibus stopped twice on the way - firstly for a seatbelts reminder, the second time for Gavin to address some really unpleasant behaviour between certain individuals in the group. Take a mixture of bad language, misogyny and plain rudeness, use your imagination, double the result and you'll be nowhere near the level of what we experienced yesterday. After a brief pause to reconsider our life choices the journey resumed, and we eventually met up with Iwan, who works for the National Trust on their grounds and looks after their work with schools and other agencies like Romsey Mill. However, I imagine that Iwan's experience of my son's Year 4 class a few months ago is the other end of the spectrum from this group.

The energy from the minibus did not disperse when we got into the open air. Larger and larger sticks and branches were being brandished, and I was not in a mood for being polite. So when I told Andy* for the 'n'th time to put his branch-sized stick down (notice the 'told', not 'asked') and he refused to co-operate unless I said 'please' I simply pulled the branch from his hand. He went off in a strop, and I decided that this wasn't a time to discuss what I've recently learnt in Greek about my choice of the 'imperative mood'.

Half an hour later Andy was still in a bad mood. Apparently I'd made his hand bleed pulling the branch from him. Not that you could tell this from looking at his hand. I apologised and thought it was over. But no, for the remainder of the session he would not forgive me. I had sticks thrown directly at me, even after I re-apologised, and after Gavin had explained that it was now time to let it go. Gavin even at one point stood in the line of fire to take my suffering upon himself (in a literal re-enactment of Jesus), but still no forgiveness, not even by the time we got back to the Mill.

Gavin and I found ourselves asking 'why?'. Why the extreme bitterness between group members, why the irrational lack of forgiveness? Why are we doing this? We realised that we're doing this tough work because nobody else is, because we've chosen to do as Jesus tells us to - to work with the last, the least and the lost. That means that it's not always going to be easy, that sometimes we want to stop, but we can't - if we stop working with the marginalised youth nobody else is going to help them.

We each walked away knowing that Jesus would have a killer line to these young people. One sentence that would stop them in their tracks, that they wouldn't be able to answer back to, that they wouldn't dare question. But what is it?

*name changed