They’ve Grown Up–And Been Changed

Whenever I have middle school students in tears while reflecting about how they see God working in their lives, I can’t help but think how amazing my job is–and how alive and active our Creator is.

Our confirmation program at Faith is set up to be a two-year process, where kids get put into small groups based on gender and spend those two years meeting regularly and growing with at least two small group leaders. These leaders are incredible servants and role models–our requirements are that the leaders meet with the kids at least twice a month, but almost all of the leaders go above and beyond and take the kids out to the movies, attend their sporting events, and work with them on service projects. We have over 30 leaders in this program, and they are without a doubt some of the most dedicated and faithful people I’ve ever met.

I have my own small group of girls with an amazing co-leader, Dawn. We’ve been together for nearly two years, and we’ve seen our girls grow and mature in incredible ways. We’ve bonded and been through a lot together–including some pretty deep and challenging situations.

Our small group at this fall's confirmation retreat

In the last two years, we’ve been to the zoo, been to “Phantom of the Opera”, been on mission trips, gotten snow cones, gone shopping, and eaten several dozen (perhaps maybe thousand) pizzas together. We’ve cried together, prayed together, and been on sugar-highs together. We’ve tackled every conceivable teen issue together, everything from sex to drinking to cutting to depression. We’ve had sleep overs  together, and have spent entire nights crammed onto one bed, sharing everything on our hearts. We’re a little family.

This summer, our girls will be confirmed–they’ll be publicly professing their faith in Jesus and their committment to our church. They’ll also be sharing their own personal testimony in front of their friends and family in a few months. I’m already proud of them.

In order to prepare them for their testimony process, we started talking about what they’ve experienced during these last two years of confirmation–how they’ve seen themselves grow, how their faith has changed, what their feelings are on the process, and how they’ve seen God at work in their lives. After spending some time shopping at the mall (yes, somehow I was blessed to end up with girls after my own heart!), we crashed at my apartment and started talking.

I expected some pretty meaningful answers. What I didn’t expect, however, was to be absolutely blown away by their responses.

This group has been a lifeline for these girls. They all talked about how it’s been a place of safety, security, acceptance, and understanding. They’ve been loved, and they’ve found a “second family”. They’ve grown, and they’ve stopped relying on the faith of their parents and have embraced their own faith. Despite the fact that they’ve all come from drastically different backgrounds (some were born Catholic, some come from largely unchurched families, and some have grown up in the Lutheran church), nearly every girl shared how she’s wrestled through her doubts and finally understood the truth that God is real.

They all talked about how they’ve seen God at work, undeniably and tangibly. And how they’ve discovered a personal relationship with their Savior, Jesus.

Even our most hyper, off-the-wall-and-never-serious girl broke down and cried as she shared how deeply changed she’s been through this experience. She shared how she never even really knew what Christianity was before she started, and how she now not only understands what her faith is all about but she also loves being in church every single week. Our entire group was reduced to tearful hugs as she shared her feelings with us.

I get chills thinking about how profoundly impacted these girls have been, and how markedly different their entire lives will be as a result of these last two years.

So, I say again: our God is alive–and He’s moving in very real ways.

Why Middle School Boys Give Me Hope

Middle school boys.

I wish I could say how utterly maddening they are with their boundless energy, their enthusiasm for throwing popcorn at each other (and threatening to dump it on me), their racing around the building chasing each other for no reason, as well as the way they down multiple Snickers bars in one sitting, hijack my computer to show me funny pictures, and fight for a spot next to me to show me their cool new iPhone app…but I can’t.

They’re awesome.

Last night, I had a whole slew of middle school boys show up to my youth event. This was definitely a first–not a single girl in the entire place. Well, I take it back–I did have one girl poke her head in and assess the unruly crowd, before running back across the parking lot to the safety of the nursery and all other teen girls. Luckily, I had three great male leaders ready for the challenge–and boy, was it a challenge when we broke out the chips, candy bars, and cappuccinos for the boys.

We also experienced another first–we all went to the Ash Wednesday service together. Usually, our events are on Fridays and there’s no opportunity for us to attend a church service together. Tonight was an exception, and it was incredible to see how these wild boys behaved in church.

They made me proud.

As a youth leader, you so often don’t see the fruit of your hard work. I can’t even count how many hours I’ve painstakingly researched for events, gathered supplies, organized leaders, set up the rooms, written devotions, and prayed for the kids–over and over and over again. Every once in a while, you get a little glimpse of how God is working in these kids–and that’s enough to keep you plowing ahead.

Sometimes, you get more than a glimpse, as I experience on our middle school mission trip to Tunica, Mississippi, last year. During that week-long experience, I saw the Holy Spirit at work in these kids and leaders so tangibly that it literally brought me to tears just thinking about it. Not a single person left that trip without seeing it and being changed by it.

Last night, I fully expected to see a bunch of rowdy kids whispering to each other and giving each other dead-arms during the service.

Instead, I saw kids–including some who I don’t think have ever stepped foot in church–soaking up every word. I saw boys hungry to read the Bible and those same boys at rapt attention during the sermon, not screwing around at all. I saw these guys discussing the Lord’s Supper together, and figuring out how to download the Bible onto their phones so they could keep reading any time, not punching each other in the arm or playing knuckle wars.

I saw teenage boys actually enjoying church.

Yes, there’s hope for this next generation (as I’ve said many times before). These boys are, well, middle school boys…but they’re more than that. They’re our church–our present and our future.

Don’t let MTV fool you–after all, it’s being run by middle-aged adults with an agenda. These kids are hungry for something deeper than they’re being fed.

And that sure does give me the inspiration to keep going. It’s not hopeless.

Gadget Addicts?

As I drove home from work today for a quick lunch, I almost got hit. Twice.

Both times, the almost-perpetrator was an ordinary-looking, middle-aged mom or dad in a car, barreling right through a red light and blasting within inches of my car.

Yikes. What is this world coming to? Really—when I think about it, I see at least a handful of people every day (in my five-minute commute) blowing through red lights. I’ve said for years that this is a definite by-product of our super-high-speed society. People don’t have enough hours in the day to do everything that is on their plates.

Ironically, the solutions we’ve come up with to save us precious time—email, iPhones, PDAs, laptops, Facebook, Twitter—just suck up even more of our time. I can’t tell you how often I see people glued to their phones, checking their email away from the office, endlessly updating Facebook, and generally wasting a lot of time on “time-savers”.

This thought brought me back to an article I read a few months ago by journalist Lucy Taylor, who posed the question, “Are we becoming a gadget-addicted generation?”

Here’s an excerpt from her October 2009 article of the same title, where she talks about how she couldn’t stop herself from incessantly checking her email while on vacation:

“I don’t do an important job like run a country, or a bank, or a company, or a newspaper. Yes, I sometimes have dead-addicted-lines to meet. But the people I work for knew I was on holiday.

There was absolutely no rational reason for me to need to check my messages and emails. But there was a powerful, irrational one and I couldn’t seem to ignore it. I suppose it was separation anxiety. I was like a baby whose favourite teddy had been taken from her. Inside I felt lost, disconnected, distressed. Pathetic, I know.

It made me think back to the days before we had the internet and mobile phones. How did we cope? Were we all so much more relaxed?

It also reminded me of a recent night out I’d been on with a group of girlfriends. Two had their iPhones on the table and repeatedly checked them. One, I later discovered, had sent several boring tweets during the meal.

I know I’m guilty of treating my mobile like a vital appendage. But I saw that night how rude and anti-social it can be to engage so enthusiastically with a piece of electronic gadgetry when you are in company.

No wonder Jennifer Aniston ditched John Mayer (if the rumours are to be believed) because of his ‘obsessive use’ of Twitter.

I also read about a woman who had deactivated her Facebook account because she was worried about the amount of time she spent on it. This woman said what had started as her favourite waste of time – an urge to share and compare – had turned into a demanding and anti- social addiction that had practically taken over her life. She said she had also become fed up with the fakery and the cultivating of one’s online ‘brand’, in which people posted anything and everything.

The turning point for her came when she completely forgot about a long-planned reunion with a friend one evening because she’d been sidetracked by ‘mindless Facebook mulling’.

So are they, am I, are we all addicted to technology?

Or is this inability to put down our gadgets a modern-day equivalent of, and no more worrying than, having your nose stuck in a book?

At the moment, there is much debate among psychiatrists and psychologists about this issue: whether there is such a thing as internet addiction. Some experts say it is becoming a major problem, and can be as destructive to a person’s life as an addiction to alcohol, gambling or pornography. They worry about online games, social networking and virtual relationships replacing real-life friendships.

But others say that the very idea of being to a medium of communication is ludicrous. They claim it is like saying someone is a ‘language addict’ or is ‘addicted’ to transport, and just makes no sense.

On the surface, this may appear to be a petty, insignificant debate. But it is an important one. In addition to internet addiction, psychiatrists are also considering whether other newly diagnosed conditions – night eating disorder, embitterment disorder, apathy disorder, pathological hoarding disorder, compulsive shopping, sex addiction and partner relational disorder (a pattern of interaction between spouses or partners characterised by negative or distorted communication) – should be considered fully fledged psychiatric illnesses and included in the next edition of the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders. This manual is the bible for mental health professionals worldwide, and is used, not only to treat patients, but also by insurance companies deciding which disorders to cover, as well as courts, prisons, pharmaceutical companies and agencies that regulate drugs.

When the handbook was first published in 1952, it contained 112 disorders. Now it has 374.

Questions have been raised about whether we should take them all seriously. Or whether the addition of new disorders is little more than a pretext for prescribing profitable drugs. With one definition of an internet addict being someone who spent more than 40 hours a week online, what this means, in effect, is that an awful lot of us could end up diagnosed with a serious mental health problem.

Kimberly Young, director of the The Center For Internet Addiction and author of Caught In The Net, says that internet addiction may not yet be clearly defined, but you know it when you see it. She says people who use computers excessively suffer many of the same problems as other addicts: failed marriages, lost jobs, neglected children and sleep deprivation.

Some addicts – whether their problem is gaming, pornography, gambling, social networking, day trading or shopping – spend up to 18 hours a day online, which can lead to physical problems, such as back strain, eye strain and carpal tunnel syndrome. ‘Some describe the internet as just being a tool, but if it is causing detriment to your life, then you have a problem,’ she says.

Part of the difficulty of acknowledging the problem is that the internet has had a ‘halo effect’.

Most people praise technology as a means to eradicate drudgery and improve productivity, she says. The internet has made many things, from banking to communication to accessing music and movies, more convenient.

Any problems, she says, are viewed as paltry compared with the benefits. ‘The internet has inherent value and utility, and there are many good things about it, but there is this dark side.’

It is a debate that is set to intensify. Like all things in life the key is moderation but, as any addict will tell you, moderation is even harder than abstinence. A scary thought for all of us who feel a pang of anxiety when we’re separated – even momentarily – from our electronic toys.”

(read the full article here)

Sure makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

How the Dog (Almost) Broke My Nose

It’s time for me to put aside my pride and confess one of the klutziest things I’ve ever done. 

If you’ve been around me in the last few weeks, maybe you noticed the ugly bruise on the ridge of my nose. If you didn’t, then my makeup camouflage worked well (thank you, Neutrogena!) 

Let me rewind a few weeks, to a random Tuesday morning. Tyler left early that morning, as he’s been student teaching early every morning in a first-grade class for one of his seminary requirements. I was left alone with the two puppies, Bonzer and Tucker. 

All you need to know about these two dogs it that Bonzer, the older and smaller dog, is quite possibly more intelligent than 75% of the human population—he can balance on his hind legs on an exercise ball, balance on my head, and knows over fifty other commands. Tucker, on the other hand, is as dumb as a brick—but very cute and cuddly. Together, they make quite the wily pair. 

It's their fault--really!

 

As I was showering that morning, Bonzer knocked over our trash can and proceeded to strew the contents all over the floor—an unfortunate habit that he has fallen into when he’s in a particularly vindictive mood. And yes, we have a trashcan with a lock, so I’m not exactly sure if I forgot to lock the trash can or if Bonzer actually has hidden opposable thumbs and opened it himself. 

Best I can figure out, Tucker then immediately launched himself on the contents of the aforesaid trash can and devoured everything in sight. Including the spicy hot peppers I dislike (that my husband insisted on putting on my Greek salad the night before) and had tossed in the trash. 

Apparently, spicy hot peppers and little puppy stomachs don’t agree. 

I hopped out of the shower and was assaulted by a foul smell. 

I ran out to the living room, and saw that Tucker had relieved himself in the foulest way possible on the floor. Gagging, I ran for paper towels and soap. It took several trips back and forth to the bathroom to clean this nastiness up. 

I was on the last handful of poopy paper towels, and mentally patting myself on the back for cleaning up so quickly that the real tragedy struck. In my haste in showering that morning, I hadn’t finagled the new shower curtain closed just right. Water seeped out into a large pool, and while I was cleaning up Tucker’s mess, the pool crept all the way around the back of the toilet and made the entire half of the bathroom a dangerously soaking mess. 

Upon entering the bathroom and going to flush those last two paper towels down the toilet, I hit the pool of water. And slipped. 

Since both of my hands were full of poop, I knew I couldn’t catch myself on the wall without smearing my face into it. So, in that split second, I didn’t use my hands to break my fall. 

Instead, I used my nose. 

My nose slammed full-force into the wall. The tears immediately rained down my face, and all I could think was, “I broke my nose because of this stupid dog’s poop?” I thought it was broken—the pain was excruciating. 

To make a long story short, I had to ice my nose for quite a while, but all that remained to give testament to this chaotic morning was that bruise on my nose. 

In order to convince my co-workers that my husband is not beating me but that I am merely a klutz, I had to spill the whole story to them when I got to the office. 

Sometimes you wonder about the stories people will tell about you at your funeral—will this be one of them?

Radical Devotion

Here are some great thoughts about leadership, from Rick Warren’s talk on radical devotion from this February’s Radicalis Conference at Saddleback Church.

Do you want to be a mushroom or an oak tree? An oak tree takes 60 years to grow; a mushroom takes only 6 weeks.

Building a healthy church takes time, just like an oak tree.

Everyone wants to be a leader, but no one wants to be a servant. God isn’t looking for servant leaders, He’s looking for servants.

For every book on servant hood, there are a thousand on leadership.

What you do and are in private determines who and how you lead in public.

Obedience and roots are the key words here: “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” (Colossians 2:6 – 7)

A radical is rooted in Christ, rooted in His word, rooted in His love: “So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17 – 19)

When you have deep roots, you are not bothered by the heat, and you can handle pressure. When you have deep roots, you are not worried by the drought, when things dry up in your life: “But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8)

The world is looking for an authoritative message through a humble messenger. Authority comes from humility.

Radical devotion is giving everything to God for Him to use you: ^“Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.’” (Matthew 22:37-38)

 ^“You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.” (Revelation 2:3-4)

You will be tempted as a pastor to use the abilities God has given you to feed yourself and your self-worth.

We are more likely to be tempted in our area of strength instead of our area of weakness.

You don’t get credit for starting the race, you get credit to ending it well. The only way you’re going to finish well is if you build roots, not fads, not therapies, not management.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how many things have gone wrong … how many failures; … if at the end of the day you love Him more and know Him better, that day was a success. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how many things you’ve accomplished; … at the end of the day if you don’t know God better and love Him more you just wasted your day because God didn’t put you on earth to mark things off your to-do list.

Priceless

Listening to the speakers

 

Two and a half hours of sleep. Kleenex boxes and sleeping bags all over the building. Tears of understanding and hugs. Impromptu midnight worship, led by students. And an entire counter full of goodies. 

 It was our first-ever Priceless Retreat, a retreat for girls junior high and senior high girls held in our student center. 

 And boy, was it incredible. 

 Over the course of Friday and Saturday, we heard from amazing guest speakers, including a doctor who explained the differences between how guys and girls are wired, and a young leader who courageously shared her testimony of loneliness and suffering. We had worship, a beautiful meal complete with a candlelit walkway, and great times of affirmation. We prayed, talked, sang, and talked some more (notice how sleep wasn’t in that list?) 

 As a leader at this event, it was just amazing to see how these girls opened up and revealed the things they really struggle with as teenagers. At one point, we kicked all of the parents out of the room and had a heart-to-heart talk about “things you wish you could tell your parents, but can’t”. Wow. I think this is truly the hardest time in history to be a teen. 

 I saw older girls putting aside their popularity and elite status as high schoolers, and intentionally taking younger girls under their wings—not one girl was left out the entire time. 

Student-led small groups praying and discussing together

 

 I saw girls admitting their biggest struggles, and entire small groups hugging each other as they cried. 

 I saw girls truly looking for the best in each other and verbalizing it during our affirmation exercise, not judging each other. 

 However significant my observations are, the real testimonies about this event are coming from these girls themselves: 

 “I learned that God treats me like His daughter and that He loves me beyond what I can imagine. I also learned that I am beautiful in His eyes!” 

 “I learned that God is never going to stop loving me.” 

 “All the girls here were saying ‘I love you’ and hugging each other like daughters of God!” 

 “He made me the way exactly how He wants me to be.” 

 “I learned that God is a friend to me and he’s always there for me to fall back on.” 

 “I had been worrying a lot about the way I looked…I felt like God was trying to tell me that I am priceless!” 

 “All of the topics were so perfect. They are exactly what I wanted to learn about.” 

 “I saw God at work through everyone bonding and getting along with everyone else. I’ve only known these girls for 24 hours, and they are already my sisters.” 

 “I was created by God. I am an image of God, and He created me for me.” 

 “I saw the tears in all of these girls’ eyes. It’s empowering. God is changing these girls and their lives.” 

 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.”