Today I was asked by one of my students if my parents loved me.  Then he asked if I loved my parents.  Then he asked if my dad was a good man. I answered him honestly which meant telling him yes to all of the questions and all he said was “hmm…ok.”  It made me sad and I couldn’t look him in the eye for fear he would see my tears. I knew why he was asking. He’s trying to make sense of his own life. This young boy’s mom is dead and his father is a drug addict. At a young age he was put to work in a shop to earn money so he ran away to India (he’s from Nepal) so he could get an education and have a better opportunity.  Since being in India and living at SBT, he’s learned Hindi and is well on his way to learning English.  He’s still struggling to make sense of it all though and he tells me every class how worried he is about his future.  He says he wakes up at night worried about it.  He says he thinks about his future while he eats, when he exercises and when he walks to class. He says he worries so much that he doesn’t have friends and he worries about that too.  He’s 16 years old.

I tell him that worrying about the future won’t change the future, it will only make today more difficult. We can only focus on today, do our best today and make ourselves better each day. Then I realized how much I’m learning from these boys because that’s a pretty good lesson and challenge for me as well.