I worked with a young woman who lost her mother quite suddenly at the very young age of 11. She told me that she was in so much pain and no one recognized it. Her teachers kept pointing to her top button which was unbuttoned when her broken heart was just three inches away. No one worried about that, only about her top button. That hurt her even more to the inner most spaces of her soul. So she started asking questions and they didn’t know what to do with her. Of course you know what they did, they sent her on her way right out of the school. I found her in an at-risk school and she became a daughter to me. B”H she is very frum today and married to a very nice yeshivish boy.
We caught this one, but we lose so many, many more. Some forever because they numb their pain with substances and sometimes they go overboard and we can never get them back. Some purposely because the pain is too much to bear and they take their own lives. But B”H there are kind hearted people out there that open their hearts and arms to them and allow them to come rushing in. They show them the love that one is supposed to show a fellow Jew. They show them what true Yiddishkeit is about and what true ahavas yisroel is about, and how to apply what we learn in the Torah to everyday life, and if we are very lucky, they start to come back home again.