What is going on?!
A little less than a month ago I had chance to speak at a large church. Now this was their Jr High youth group bible study not Sunday morning. It was a great experience, tons of kids, lots of questions, they paid attention. Afterward though I had chance to speak with some kids and youth leaders. This speaking engagement followed a youth retreat I went on where I got to talk to a full time youth speaker who travels all over North America.
The bottom line of what I’ve learned, we are losing our kids to this world. I’m not even talking about the amount of kids that aren’t Christians and probably never will be. I’m talking about most kids are totally f*&#ed up. For kids grades 4 – 12, one and six self injure themselves as coping mechanism. These are kids who aren’t suicidal, they simply are dealing with things so far above their mental and emotional capacities, mixed with having no where and no one to talk to about it, cutting themselves or whatever is the only means they have of expressing their stress, fear and anxiety. The youth group had 12 year old girls with STI’s, half of them ones they will have for the rest of their lives. We are raising up a generation of porn addicts, pot heads and drop outs. As someone who is a youth worker and I am close with people who work with youth full-time, this battle is hard to win. Again, this isn’t about converting people, this about helping kids get to normal again. How can we compete against negligent parents, non-existence fathers and a world whose message consists of telling everyone to be unsatisfied with who they are and what they have? Kids get their sense of identity, value and values from their parents, when they are denied that they then go into a world where they don’t know anything about themselves other than that they aren’t good enough or worth anything outside of what stuff they have and how their peer group responds to that stuff.
Hey parents WISE UP!!! Spend some time with them once a while, get the damn computer out of their bedroom’s, co-ed sleepovers are not ok!!! Some parents went to my friend who is a youth pastor and said that they found out that their Jr High age daughter was sending topless pictures of herself to a boy. They wanted to know how to punish her. He said, you bought the computer, put it in her room, hooked it up to the internet without restrictions and bought her a web cam. You should be grounded for a week not your daughter.
The beautiful thing though, is that things are so extreme that all I can do is turn and get kids to turn to Christ. I cannot compete with what these kids have to deal with and I can’t save them from it. Literally, the only thing I can do is love them and point them to Christ.
Leave a Reply