YMJen

While in Arkansas two weeks ago for a summer mission trip, I met a 13 year old boy named Richie, someone the local principal had deemed “white trash”. In addition to knowing the label he’d been given, before ever meeting Richie, I was also warned that he had been problematic throughout the summer, often striking out against people at the Sportscamp we were helping to facilitate and seldom engaging in the given activity, instead choosing to distract people and cause trouble.

Richie showed up to our first day of Sportscamp late. He immediately grabbed another kid, Joshua, and a bunch of equipment and started running around with it, swinging at people with the hockey stick and just generally wreaking havoc. Yet, that day, while on a water break, Richie connected with one of my high school seniors. Richie sat with her for 45 minutes discussing cars, something this poor girl knew nothing about.

Tuesday, Richie strolled in, late again. This time, his sidekick, Joshua, was absent so he grabbed a replacement sidekick and together, they ran screaming into the hallway. After several of my students tried valiantly to get them to join us for a rousing game of street hockey, I followed the horrific sounds coming from the hallway piano and discovered both kids banging its keys with all their might.

Choosing to see this as an interest in music, I asked if they wanted to learn a song. Much to my surprise, both agreed and so I spent the next half hour teaching them the duet, “Heart and Soul”. When Richie successfully played his part of the song to me, I praised him and was utterly amazed at the look of pride that flashed across his face.

As we continued to play the piano, I asked Richie where Joshua was. He responded, “At basketball practice.”

Sensing there was more to this story, I asked Richie why he also wasn’t at basketball practice. He replied, “I love basketball more than any other sport. But I’m the bad kid and they won’t let me in no more.”

With that, my heart broke.

Later, Richie and I built some warships out of Legos and as we did, I asked him about his family. I learned he lived with his dad, who seldom payed attention to him and his sister, who was about to move into her own apartment. When I asked where his mom was, he said, “I don’t know. She just took off one day. We’ve never seen her since.”

With that, what was left of my heart broke.

And suddenly, Richie’s behavior began to make sense to me.

Left without a mama, Richie had been repeatedly labeled “white trash” and the “bad kid”. With no one to contradict this negative labeling, Richie chose instead to believe those labels, which began to define him. My guess is that slowly but surely, he altered his behavior until it matched that of a “bad kid”. Richie became the person the adults in his life told him he was.

Unfortunately, such is the case with today’s youth: They become who we say they are. That’s why it’s so important for youth to have adults walk alongside them, encouraging, affirming, and positively labeling them, just as Christ did with his apostles.

Take Peter.

Peter’s the apostle that I’d argue was perhaps the biggest dimwit of them all. He was arrogant, pushy, stubborn, and way too talkative. Long before he did anything to deserve recognition or fame, Jesus positively labeled Peter the “rock,” saying that it would be on this rock that he’d build his church (Matthew 16:18). At the time he said this, Jesus had seen little evidence to support calling Peter the rock. Yet, Jesus saw his potential and spoke that into him until Peter finally believed it, truly becoming the rock of the early church.

Just as Jesus did with Peter, as a youth worker, one of my primary functions is to speak potential into the lives of my kids; To label all kids positively, in a way that focuses on their potential rather than simply on their past behavior.

After all, if youth become who we say they are, then I want to make sure that I’m telling them they are someone created in God’s image and LOVED by God.

I only wish someone would have told Richie that. How different his life might be if that were the case.

I spent last week helping with Vacation Bible School. Like many churches across the country, ours uses Group’s “easy” VBS. Through it, I ventured on a “High Seas Expedition” with some 90 kids from our community, leading them during the Bible Voyage time.

This year, during Bible Voyage, we told a somewhat random collection of stories from the book of Acts: The story of Peter being imprisoned and then released from jail; The story of Paul being shipwrecked; The story of Paul on Malta; The healing of a beggar by Peter and John; And the story of the early church.

While there are actually many things that I appreciate about Group’s VBS including the ideas that its curriculum has for creatively, yet simply bringing the stories to life, one thing that I do not appreciate about Group is the way it reduces each of these complex and powerful stories into one simple, catch phrase like “God’s Word is comforting” or “God’s Word is life changing”. Such a reduction is actually a disservice to our kids because it takes away from the innate power of stories which naturally have the ability to captivate young and old alike. What’s more, such reductions carry with them an inherent danger: That in trying to draw out life applications we reach too far, drawing conclusions and principles not actually present in the text.

For example: I find it difficult to imagine that when Luke recorded the story of Paul’s shipwreck, he did so hoping to teach people that God’s Word is comforting. And I can say with some confidence that when Luke told the story of Peter and John healing a beggar outside the temple, that he was, in no way, trying to teach us that we are all crippled by sin (a conclusion that Group’s curriculum did, in fact, reach) or even that God’s Word is life changing. What does “God’s Word is life changing” even mean to a five or six year old who has barely developed the ability to think concretely, yet alone to think abstractly?

Despite this, in the age of the “Life Application Bible,” I think that too many of those of us who work in the church fall prey to the myth that without formulas, catchy sayings, or three easy steps, our teaching is useless. Yet all this myth really reflects is that we’ve forgotten the power of a good story.

Like nothing else, stories have the power to captivate us, challenge us, convict us, and move us. This is something that even my five year olds intuitively grasped during VBS, as they sat in our makeshift boat, riveted to the story of Paul’s shipwreck and survival. It’s something that I think Luke also grasped as he recorded story after story in both his Gospel and in Acts.

Though I cannot say for certain, I also suspect that Luke told these stories for the same reason we should: To pass on the history of our people to the next generation. As one of my favorite authors, Kenda Creasy Dean asserts, we tell stories of faith because “it’s our family’s story. It’s who we are. The church tells this story to young people for the same reason we tell stories of grandparents around the dinner table: So our children will know whose blood courses through their veins, so they’ll know who they are, why we live as we do, and why it matters.”

Because while stories reflect our identity, they also do something more: They shape our identity. The more we hear stories, the more those stories come to life in our lives. We start to, in some mysterious way, live them out. As we do, we experience them. But more importantly, as we do, we also experience God, who is, himself, a master storyteller and the creator of our story.

I’m an avid reader and now that school is out for the summer, I’ve been enjoying lots of fiction, some ministry books, non-fiction Christian books, and some magazines. In reading, I stumbled upon an article that said “72 percent of those in ministry read their Bibles only for prep work,” a statistic which the author called “troubling”.

For years, I’ve heard pastors, church workers, and even lay people implore me to begin every day with a Quiet Time in God’s Word, and to make this time separate from any time I spend in God’s Word preparing to give a talk or lead a Bible study. But I’ve never understood this. Why can’t my prep time also be my quiet time with God?

Some of my richest encounters with God have actually come as a result of preparing for something that I’m about to teach. Take Tuesday, when I spent about four hours preparing to lead a Bible study on the Woman at the Well. (John 4). Because I was preparing to “teach” this story, I explored it much more thoroughly than I would have had I simply been reading the story during a quiet time. I sat at my desk, prayerfully studying the Word using the Bible and two of my favorite commentaries. As I studied both God’s Word and how people far wiser than I had interpreted it, I found myself captivated by this story yet again; Drawn to the fact that Christ chooses to reveal his identity to this unlikely, scandalous Samaritan woman, thereby vividly demonstrating that his message, love, and grace are for ALL people.

Without a doubt, during my nearly nine years in ministry, it’s been during the times when I’ve been preparing to teach God’s Word to others that God has most challenged and deepened my own faith. God’s often used that preparation time as a catalyst for further spiritual growth, necessary to mold me into the woman He’s created me to be.

Because of this experience, I struggle with the idea that to be a good Christian or youth worker, I must also take an additional, separate 30 minutes in the morning to have a “quiet time” with God. To me, all this does is place God in a box, effectively limiting those times we expect him to work by saying, “OK God, THIS and only THIS is the time in which you can work in my own life.”

But isn’t God actually much bigger than that? Isn’t the God we worship big enough to minister to us throughout our day – anytime we open his Word, regardless of the reason why? Isn’t the God we worship big enough to speak to us not just through his Word, but also through nature, art, music, people (including the teens we serve), and other writers?

I believe He is.

Moreover, I believe that worship and that our study of God’s Word is, in actuality, meant to be much more far reaching than we tend to imagine; That it’s meant to be much less about compartmentalizing our lives into specific time slots – worship here, read God’s Word here, serve here, and live the rest of our lives over here – and much more about a holistic perspective.

As Romans 12:1-2 says, “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

If God is, in fact, big enough to work in a variety of ways and if worship is really meant to be an outpouring of the rest of our lives, then perhaps we need to spend less time bemoaning the fact that 72% of those in ministry read their Bibles only for prep work and instead CELEBRATE how God is at work in and through those church workers – both as we prepare and as we teach and lead, doing all we can to connect to Christ ourselves and then teaching others to do the same.