In his book, Boundaries With Teens, author John Townsend talks about the 4 anchors of parenting. You’ll notice the excellent balance of tension.
Love (I’m on your side) is balanced nicely with Truth (I have some rules).
Freedom (You can choose to respect or reject the rules) stands in tension with Reality (Here is what will happen)
As with all of life, the temptation to eliminate tension is to generally error to one side or the other.
As students move from dependence to independence, freedom plays an enormous role. Check out the three groups listed below and their unique challenge with freedom:
Most students think prayer is about them. And it usually centers on situations they’re in. My Grandma broke her foot. My coach is a jerk. Exams are coming up. I’m like, so busy. Listening to prayer requests within a small group can often give new definition to narcissism. Does God care about the daily drama of our lives? You bet. Were you drawn into the depth and character of God by listening to the list above? Ummmmm…
Where’d students learn to pray like this? Ok, let’s not answer that question.
The Puritans used to have a saying, ‘pray until you pray’. Why? Because all of us struggle with the ability to get beyond ourselves when we enter prayer. The presenting issues of our lives vie for attention like kindergartners eager to answer a question.
The best way to get beyond our small stories (while in prayer) is to enter God’s story. See if any of the following can lend a new twist to your sequence in prayer:
-Praying through redemptive history
1. Creation – our insatiable longing for life to work finds its origin in God’s perfect beginning. Seeing Him as the author and match for such longing is to right-size ourselves. All things were made by him and for him.
2. Fall – admitting the alienation within all relationships (with God, with others, with creation). Seeing your personal culpability in broken humanity.
3. Redemption – this becomes the daily, incomprehensible truth that God loves us because of what he finds in himself, that his act of love and forgiveness is not based on our performance or achievement (flying fully in the face of American achievement and ascent). Ironically, this frees us from a fixation on ourselves in the growing ability to love like he loves
4. Restoration – when God will make all things right, matching forever our longings with his presence.
-Using scripture to re-tell God’s story
5. Praying through the sequence of God’s story and how he used individuals. This form of praying takes key individuals throughout the bible and uses their life lessons to develop our God-focus in prayer
6. Using key verses in the Bible from memory. This approach to prayer helps build a repeating vocabulary of a) who God is and b) what he’s doing
7. Lining up character qualities of God. I like using the alphabet to describe the depth and breadth of God (Almighty, Benevolent, Caring, Dependable, Excellent, Faithful…..). The second step includes matching each quality with a verse.
The result of our deepening prayer life is two-fold: 1) we mature because we’re immersed in God’s large story and 2) we model to students how to get off the ‘small life’
You’ve probably seen the commercial where everyone is carrying a giant, carved out figure representing the amount of money in their retirement account. $1,257,833……..$43,756…..$2,356,988
The commercial is troubling in many ways but perhaps the most significant being that money and security never intersect. Yet the overwhelming, mind-numbing mantra of our culture is that money = security.
Some years ago I was stunned upon completing a 36-month bible study. I’d been so fixated on the money struggle that I decided once and for all to see what the Bible had to say about it. Anyone can extract a verse about money and imply that the Bible teaches such n such. But I wanted the entire thing.
The process is daunting. Take every conceivable word related to money (gold, silver, possessions, riches, rich, richer, poor, poorest, wealth, accumulation, greed, money, etc) and trace each word through the entire Bible, writing a brief phrase next to each verse to capture the core meaning.
Then comes the enlightening part. Picture a tepee village in your mind, each of varying size and shape. The village is formed this way. Each new concept found in a particular verse creates a new tepee. Let’s say our verse is, ‘the borrower is servant to the lender’. You form a tepee entitled ‘debt’. If our next verse talks about debt, we put it in the same tepee. If not, we form a new one. A tepee grows in size with each addition.
Would you like to guess as to the central, largest tepee when all the verses are compiled? Hint, the competition is not even close. This central tepee dwarfs all others: Uncertainty. Money transfers and cannot be secured. It goes through our hands like sifting sand.
Quiz. Who said this: ‘money is never really secure until you give it away’?
The growing tendency in youth culture is to hyperventilate over situations. If something is tracking south (going from bad to worse), God doesn’t like the kid. Conversely, if his or her prospects are looking up, God favors them.
This tendency to define God by the small is an ancient struggle and often exists in our lives just as much as it does in the lives of our students. We fashion a concept of how God should function- notice me and come to my aid- and then proceed to rate him on his performance. This is one reason people become so disillusioned with God.
Our role is to effectively kill the ‘small life’ on a daily basis, to allow the situations to yield their own disillusionment and draw us up into the grand story- the unfolding drama of redemptive history. Life is about God.
Richard Rohr reminds us of five essential truths:
If you’re like me the list appears excessively negative. But imagine the student who ties into these life lessons. And how will that student learn if we don’t arrive there first?
The list is only negative if we fixate on it. But if it helps to deliver us from our small ambitions and into God’s large plan, then we’ve truly learned to live above our situations.
Someone told me to relax last week saying, ‘it’s just a means to an end’.
This was particularly good advice for a guy who tends to get caught up in the means. The process (often daily) of reflecting on why I was placed on earth is a necessary assignment. Putting fresh words and emphasis on it only improves our walk with Jesus.
Common phrases that people have adopted include:
What’s your phrase? Can it be freshened up without violating God’s word?
A good topic to engage kids in is swearing. The category itself has become so confused that most kids tend to wonder where the line is, choosing to buy into the cultural definition rather than the biblical one.
Cultural Categories:
Really bad (swearing) – ‘What the f…’
Kind of bad (swearing) – ‘Looks like a pile of sh...’
Acceptable – ‘Oh my god, did you see that?’
How did the majority of our kids come to accept these definitions? They certainly don’t reflect biblical categories. Most kids cannot come close when asked to define ‘swearing’. That’s why it such a fruitful discussion to have because the Bible is quite clear.
Biblical Categories:
Really Bad – Using God’s name in an empty way (‘oh my god…’ – the 3rd commandment out of Exodus 20)
Swearing – Adding expletives to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ like an oath (‘Heavens yes’) We are told in James to simply use ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (everything else is condemned)
Inappropriate speech – This is where categories one and two from above (cultural categories) should land. Ephesians 4:29 says such words are unwholesome.
You’ll notice that most families have ‘grey’ areas when it comes to speech. Minor words are allowed by some and disallowed by others but the biblical categories- and the listed sequence- cannot be compromised. It is far more dishonoring to use God’s name in an empty way than to use inappropriate speech. But I think you’ll find that most evangelical kids don’t practice this. Ask them and see what you discover.
‘You won’t tell my parents right?’
We hear variations on this phrase often but how should a youth worker respond? Do we make the promise?
There are two extremes that can influence confidentiality but fortunately they are quite rare: 1) the student is in some type of real danger and confidentiality should be breached, 2) one of the parents would respond in such a way so that the student could be harmed. Each of these would dictate differing responses.
Most of our interactions however avoid the extremes. And in these instances our best course of action is to patiently listen and eventually challenge the student to be the one to break the news to their parent(s). I’m often surprised. After listening and gently leading students towards wise choices, they’ll often take the challenge, the risk of talking to mom or dad.
For those of us as parents, the rule of thumb is, ‘how would I want to be treated?’ We’d want to know right? And for 90% of our situations, this is the goal when kids open up with ‘you won’t tell my parents right?’
A mentor of mine paid his kids $1 per every book they read. So I did the same thing, gradually changing the standard for what comprised a ‘book’. When our kids were little, we celebrated picture books. When older, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ was still….$1
I walked into a publishing house recently and was greeted by a thought-provoking poster, ‘fiction reveals a truth that reality obscures’. I’ve thought long and hard over that quote as I compare both fiction and non-fiction. Perhaps you favor one or the other; perhaps you’re like me and enjoy both. But I suspect we all agree. Reading is essential, both as a passion and a life-skill.
The challenge before us is daunting. We’re working with students who have technological wonders at their fingertips. Immediate gratification. How do books and book-reading stand a chance?
I suspect that my mentor felt the same way when he invoked the $1/book reward. And like him, it’s up to us to creatively get kids into books. Here are a couple of things we’ve tried:
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