Play For Hope

We began the Play For Hope coach training with two basic questions to introduce the coaches to the idea of child psychology.  Every child Seth Taylor taught them is trying to answer these two questions:  What makes me safe?  What makes me valuable?  Many of the children we work with live on the streets or have lived on the streets.  They have seen and experienced a brutality that is difficult to describe for someone so young.   Many have led lives of fighting, drugs, genocide, and abuse.  They do not have an environment that inherently makes them feel safe or valuable, as they are the lowest in society.  Therefore they find safety and value in their ability to beat up another child, in their ability to take drugs at night to numb the fear and hunger.  Their safety and value becomes performance driven instead of finding the value of being who they are.  This issue is destructive to their ability to perform on the soccer field or basketball court (as they do not feel safe to make mistakes, because making a mistake defines their inner being as being worthless) and to overcome the obstacles in their lives.  Over the course of six days we worked with the coaches putting words onto what many of them had been doing and drawing their attention to their calling of creating a sporting environment in which a child could understand that no matter what they did they would be loved so that they could begin to feel like they were at home and find out that they are truly valuable and safe so that they did not need things like drugs, fighting, and that they could do something greater in their lives than live on the streets.  We wanted the children to especially know how valuable God views them.  As our coaches continue to build environments for their children, I truly believe we will see more and more children leave the streets and fulfill their dreams.  I have already seen it happen in a few teams, now I hope we can see it in many teams.