So, I gave a talk tonight. I'm never nervous about speaking in front of middle school kids because I do it often. Tonight however I was a little nervous. I gave my talk tonight on what this whole God/Jesus thing means to me. I started off by telling the kids that the've been dealt a crappy hand in life. That the world sucks. And that we went through the Jesus story to find a solution to our shitty world. I proceeded to tell them that at one point I stopped believing in God and eventually came back to faith because I re-discovered what God was.
Anyways...here's the fun part. After the talk, I was milling around and a kid grabbed me and struck up a converstation about my talk and how it interested him. How he is trying to figure out this whole God thing and he's not sure what to think, but what I said was intrigueing(spelling?). Then his friends came around and he stopped talking.
Every youth worker hopes at some point that a kid will engage them in conversation about God or whatever. It makes us feel like we're doing our job...even for me. I don't ever expect to "lead a kid to Christ" in the traditional sense, but I do enjoy a nice real conversation and l like to hear kids question things. All I want to do, is be there to help them think through things. This is probably the only time this will ever happen in the rest of my ministry career...and that's ok. James was the youth pastor at a church I went to in early high school. I wonder if I was that kid for him at all -- the one that he never thought he'd "reach" -- although i didn't really hang around him much. But I can imagine that if the NOW me was working with the THEN me, the NOW me would be pretty damn frustrated.
Anyways, tonight I as encouraged. That's nice for a change. I get verbal encouragement from people all the time, but this was a different type of encouragement.
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2 comments:
dude, quit now while you are ahead. otherwise you will find yourself in back in the world of irrelevance and wondering where you went wrong when all your students are either strippers, in jail, pagens, or are posting half naked photos of themselves on their myspace.
GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL HAVE A SOUL!
You weren't that kid my friend. I was more concerned that i/we weren't reaching many on the peripheries of the faith. Of course, my perspective on ministry has changed dramatically since then and to no one's surprise there are things I would do differently.
I recall you started showing up more in the spring of the year that i was interning there. The only thing i wondered concerning you was simply if you were interested in the group as a whole. You were a rather quiet fellow. Wasn't really frustrated with you or anything.
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