Isn’t it amazing how today’s youth handle the dark parts of life and the pain that follows? I’m constantly amazed with the youth I work with who are suburban living with urban problems. Some of you are so blessed to be working with youth who have a hungry heart after God. Or you have youth with good, two-parent families that have provided a healthy foundation for you to water on. God has given me a group of teens to raise who are not that. My kids live in abnormal situations and see them as normal. Where is my ministry starting point when what is normal is not “mom, apple pie, and Chevrolet?” When normal to them shows no sign of even a TV sitcom family? When there are no clear lines of right and wrong? It’s only normal and better.
Recently two of my boys found themselves over their heads in murder. One hitched a ride to the mall with some guys he grew up with. Sinners and thugs to the rest of the population. On the way to the mall they decided to pull into another neighborhood to buy some weed. The drug deal went bad and the dealer was shot dead. Just like that. No one saw it coming until Randy had to lean away to avoid getting burned from the shell casings from gun that the shooter held sitting next to him in the backseat. Randy never told anyone what occurred that night, until he was charged with murder. He witnessed a murder and never told anyone.
Three days later another one of my boys we’ll call Jim, was driving around with some of these same guys. They were drunk and one of them was carrying a gun (the same gun). You may be wondering why a Christian kid was driving around drunk friends but then you are already asking yourself that same question about some of your own youth.
While he was pumping gas, a fight broke out just outside the store. With wisdom, Jim drove off. As he was driving away he heard shots go off. It turned out his friend shot someone seven times dead.
Jim did tell someone of his involvement and was cleared of that mess in a day. Randy, on the other hand, was charged with murder, put on house arrest, and homebound from school until the charge was changed to a misdemeanor for not reporting a crime. Too late to recover the school year, his football season, and most likely any football scholarship as he can’t play scholastic sports ever again because of the seriousness of the crime. Here is a lesson to teach. When witnessing a murder, tell someone.
This true story becomes even more unreal when you consider their terrifying fear of frogs. Or when Jim scraped his wrist with a razor blade at his job and he was terrified of bleeding to death. He was panicked and near tears.
How do you help kids like this when you want to laugh at the scrape and be appalled at flying shell casings? How do you help if what they see every day becomes normal to them but breaks our heart? We watch our teens go in full cycles from following God, to falling into sin, to reaping that destruction, and finally coming back to God. So how do you stop the cycle?
News bulletin: Teens do not have a true sense of reality (duh!). That is all a part of adolescent development hence we get them as a work in progress. What teen doesn’t think they know it all? I know you thought you knew it all at that age. This is because teens are experiencing and thinking through stuff for the first time. Piaget called it abstract operations. Suddenly the world is larger than mom and dad (or mom or dad), the church, school life, etc. And the reality of mom or dad or anything else may not be so great. Loyalties are switched to friends, the neighborhood, and gangs. The reality of their family and family cycle is not what they want–and it could be a good family cycle.
Since teens supposedly know it all, this new association is everything–even if right and wrong becomes blurred to be associated. Yet this only causes more pain and the cycle continues. We all know this because we watch this in the lives of our own youth we work with. So what do you do?
A large part of what I do with with my much-loved group is to widen their reality. If reality is a thug neighborhood as seen out their doors, through MTV, through the movies they choose to watch, it becomes what they know. How often do you see a frog in the projects? I purposely show them better communication, good marriages, holy lifestyles and frogs. I show a wider reality so they can pick and choose what they know beyond the ‘hood and family cycles.
When I do widen their reality, when we are camping or they are making a meal in my kitchen or whatever, true talking happens. Conversation just comes up that addresses their pain. And that’s where I can begin to teach healing, forgiveness, and spiritual responses to life. I have been allowed into their reality to help expand it. They are trusting me to help them expand it with their thoughts and questions.
As we widen their reality we are also providing spiritual markers or memories that they can gauge their own life with. These are memories that teens can use when they are trying to figure out life. They can pull out strong memories of pure fun, peace of mind, of being understood and are all tied into God. No matter how much pain they are in, teens will never be able to ignore their memories and those memories will shape their faith and life.
Our youth programs, church traditions, and grand events all provide these spiritual markers. Our time one-on-one provides spiritual markers. Not all of these spiritual markers though happen within the church walls or on our schedule. That’s what is tough about youth ministry–as well as rewarding. A bonus is that we get memories that grow our personal faith. We all have some precious memories that keep us doing the work that we are doing.
This is the core of my ministry philosophy with my uniquely wonderful and difficult youth. Everything I do is to provide memories.
While under house arrest, Randy’s goal was to somehow get permission to go on the Day One trip to Detroit, Michigan. He knew there would be memories there that he wanted and he got those memories. He went into some new states and even into his first foreign country–Canada. A big deal. While at Day One, Randy saw 70,000 other teens, most not having witnessed murder. He saw some in wild abandonment in their praise to God and he saw many who acted out of disrespect toward the speakers. That deeply bothered him. He is the one with the arrest record and the screwed up junior year of high school. Through that widening of his reality, he was able to come to some terms about what was happening in his life and it was good. The work done in his life at Day One went way beyond what the speakers earnestly were saying. It provided a memory that he will build his faith on and stop the cycle of pain.
