"We stay here..."

Yesterday I was doing some research on the neighborhood and came up with this. The first picture is of the crimes within .25 mile of the mission in the last year. The second picture is the same statistic for a random address in a middle class Edmond neighborhood. See any difference?

A month or two back one of our kids got jumped on the street right in front of our eyes. Luke and Ron broke it up and got threatened in the process. Apparently the kid that jumped our kid is a member of a notorious local gang. He mentioned bringing other members back after us. We had all the kids get inside the building and we locked ourselves in. During our lock down I was talking with one of the teenage boys. Although this kid is over 6 foot and usually one our "tough kids", he was visibly scared about the consequences of us messing with gang members, or rather protecting one of our kids. I tried to encourage him and tell him that God would protect us and everything would be okay... his response was one that I won't soon forget. He said, "At the end of every day you get in your car and drive back to your home in Edmond, when you do that, we stay here and LIVE in this".

I don't think there are any black and white answers of how to save our kids from their surroundings. But, I do know that each day we can ask for God to continue to place his angels around the houses of our kids as they sleep at night. Will you pray that protection over them too?