>>Dont.forget.about.her
December 7, 2008
>> I was talking to a friend one day about her experience at a Christian retreat that she went to with her youth group and she began to tell me how she thought it was “good.” Now understand this, my friend doesn’t claim to be “Super Christian” or anything like that, and she would never miss a beat to tell me the honest truth. So she began to tell me how that retreat followed the same cliche of people saying “Don’t leave this retreat the same!” and “It’s not about here it is about what you do when you leave!” She wasn’t impressed by the same tactics used to convince and persuade these teens to not let their personal experience die. She said she had seen it happen too many times. So with this small amount of skepticism she told me what bothered her most. She said that the main speaker hammered down on the usual things of: drugs, sex, etc and paralleled it to living for Christ. An example might be, “You did it in the world, so you should do this for Christ.” As I had this discussion with her she told me that she was left feeling offended most of the time. She didn’t feel like she fell in this category of teens that had done a bunch of wrong. She felt like she was missed in some ministering because he only hammered on these people had made so many mistakes. I asked her, “So you don’t think you have done a whole bunch wrong huh?” And she said, “No not really.”
Now some of you may want to start quoting and say, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” And such is true. But even though she comes from a different belief system than myself I did take this away: Don’t forget about her (or the one) who is trying to make it. Don’t forget about those who haven’t made all the mistakes and who have stood with convictions and haven’t fallen into the statistics. Some teens do go home and read their bible, pray, and talk to their school peers about Jesus. Not every teenager goes out to drink on the weekend or looks at porn. Some are in hot pursuit of Christ and the calling that is on their lives. It isn’t safe to assume that everyone is following the patterns of the culture of the world or even the youth culture inside the church.
Now wither she was telling the truth or not, I dunno, it isn’t for me to judge. But I do know this, we can’t forget to minister and encourage teenagers like her.
