If someone would have told me even a year ago I’d be serving and worshipping with the FCC Youth Ministry in any way other than perhaps vacuuming the Upper Room I would have told them they had to be higher than the clear blue sky.
Yet that is what happened.
One or perhaps two Sunday mornings a month you will find me in the high school room doing my best impersonation of “teacher.” I wonder how I got there sometimes. Oh, yeah. It’s because my wife is more awesome than yours.
We were having a conversation about serving, and where we might do that. More specifically where I might serve. She encouraged me to think of where I’d been hurt the most, and blessed with the most healing by God. She said she thought that is where I would be most effective in my service.
High school, without a doubt.
I was not a popular kid. I was a geek then and am now. The popular kids then were just as ruthless then as they today, I’d imagine. When you combine that with the deaths of three people close to me thanks to heart attack, suicide and cancer from 16-18 you get a messed up kid, which I very much was.
I made it, though, and I am here today by the Grace of a loving and forgiving God who saw fit to speak truth about my value to Him into my wasted heart. I may be patched, and I may be scarred, but Jesus was, too.
The knowledge that he did those things on my part is why I can go into that room on Sunday mornings and just keep sharing with the kids the truth that’s been revealed to me, even though it scares the crap out of me sometimes.
Aside: Let me tell you about the Youth Ministers at FCC. They are two young men who lift those kids up in ways many of them will never even know. They preach, and teach, and pray, and they make the kids think and challenge the things that feel so much like truth when you’re young.
They use the gospel, and humor, and truth, and the Grace empowered them by a God who is in the business of reaching people. These men, along with the other men and women who serve as teachers and Focus Group leaders, prayors and laborers–they’re doing a great work, and a labor of love. They are, to a person, awesome.
–end of aside
I am not yet including myself in that awesomeness, because I have much yet to learn. Yet because of serving with them and praying with them over the past few months, I know I am in the right place and doing the right thing. I thank and praise God for that assurance.
It is no picnic. It’s tough being a kid, and often being made to go places you aren’t that interested in being. Like Sunday School.
I’m not giving up on them, and I plan to stick with both the ministry and them as long as they’ll have me or until God wants me somewhere else. Certainly the kids will change with the time. I hope I do, too.
Right now, I’m just really grateful to be here, and have the chance to do what I’m doing.
A Work in Progress 
Include yourself in the list.
It’s not a matter of learning, or being worthy… its a matter of having a willing heart. It takes a man after God’s own heart to walk into a room of young people and share with them. It’s awkward, silly and sometimes frustrating but don’t mistake what looks like “polish” now as trumping having a servant’s heart. The bonds I made with students in my awkward first days of being a youth leader last to this day. They are all the more precious to me because those students who are now young men and women saw me as I was taking my first hesitant steps into and amazing adventure God planned for my life. In a way we “grew up” together and I am honored to call them my brothers and sisters in Christ. To see Kroix for example teaching my son in middle school as I once taught him… makes my heart light up like the 4th of July. We serve and amazing God. Trust in Him and lean not on your own understanding.
It’s getting a bit less awkward, though I don’t know if I’ll ever be entirely comfortable. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know. Anyway, thanks for the encouragement. I will keep on truckin’