“Did you get enough sleep?” The night man asked me.
I just looked at him like he was crazy; it was 7 am and I hadn’t gone to bed last night until 3.
“Your conscience?”
I had to curb my anger when he intimated that I should have a guilty conscience. You see, the night before, I’d had to tell our youngest resident, we call him Billy the Kid, that he had lost all of his priveleges and was being moved to the “line”.
Line people are those who are nightly residents. They leave the Mission early each morning and go out and do whatever returning at lunch/and or dinner. They have to be at the Mission each afternoon at 4:45 in order to stay the night, they attend a Bible study, eat dinner, shower and then retire to the dorm where they must stay until the next morning. They have no TV room priveleges.
Billy the Kid has been with us for about 6 weeks; in that time, he’s broken several rules–some of them severe. We caught him “huffing” paint to get high soon after his arrival, and we’ve had various other problems with him since. He’s basically a good kid, but sadly has become somewhat institutionalized in group homes and the like. He’s one of the smoothest liars I’ve ever encountered and an expert at not looking guilty when caught in the act of breaking a rule. It’s obviously held him in good stead over the years, but in government-run institutions. In a place like ours where we use the leading of the Holy Spirit to (hopefully and prayerfully) guide our actions, it doesn’t float.
After his penultimate infraction, I’d evicted him from his semi-private room into the men’s dorm hoping that he’d see both the precariousness of his situation and the serioius need to change his attitude. Last night, though, I discovered that he assumed he could just sleep in the dorm, but still use his former room as his own at any time he thought I wouldn’t know about it. So, at 11:00 pm, I let him know that he’d be leaving on the line this morning.
“No, I have no reason to have a guilty conscience. This is my job. I have to make sure that people understand that they have to follow the rules whether someone’s looking at them or not. If God sends someone to Hell, because they refused to accept the gift of His Son’s shed blood as payment for their sins, He may not feel great about it, but I’m sure he doesn’t feel Guilty. Billy chose to break the rules, I didn’t make him do that, so the guilt is his and his alone. I don’t feel happy about having to discipline him, but it has to be done if he’s ever going to stop being a kid and start being a man.”
Evidently it hasn’t worked yet. I found out when I came down this morning that Billy had left with an attitude: “I’d better get out, I don’t want to be down here when he get’s down or I might do something else stupid and get thrown out completely.”
He didn’t have to be here to have done something stupid; I told him to “pack whatever you can carry and put the rest in the donations to go to Mexico. You came with only what you could carry and if you get back on the program, you can get more stuff then, but you have to carry everything you own with you every time you leave the mission.”
Instead of packing everything to go out in the donations, he put it in the laundry room hoping that the clothing would be washed and put in the cabinets to be later reclaimed by him, should he return on the program. Again, a little thing, but direct disobedience to an order: his forte.
I pray for the boy, that he’ll learn to be a man.
