Up And Down At Church

I am a Christian. For many years I felt that meant getting dressed up and going to church a few times a week. Sure I would read my Bible now and then, sometimes I would even get on a "study plan" to read so much per day or whatever. I would pray. That was about it. Not too much out my life. Just enough to say "I am a Christian"

One thing that always stood out to me in the "church world" was the area of missions. My local churches would have missionaries come from all over the world and talk about how they were serving God. I used to think that I wanted to go off somewhere far away and exotic so I could tell people that there is a God and He loves them. It never occurred to me that there were people all around me that needed to hear that, too.

A few years ago my husband and I felt that God was really calling us to do more than just sit around on our bench looking pretty. We started looking into seminaries that we could attend. The hard part of that is that we do not live near one, and we had two children at that time. Guess what happened? Samuel came into existence at that same time. Moving out of state was not feasible.

Mark got approached about becoming a youth pastor at a nearby church. My first reaction was youth, you gotta be kidding me?!?!? Like a lot of people I even had the thought that at first that maybe if Mark served with youth for a while that he would eventually get a job as a pastor somewhere.

Fast forward to today: Still a youth pastor. New church. New town. We went from living in an apartment with close-by neighbors and schools to living out in the country with NO neighbors. That is not all that has changed. My whole outlook has changed. I used to think teenagers were all a bunch of self-centered whiny-babies. I used to think that they really did not know what it meant to go through hard times. Boy was I ever wrong.

Our youth group now has a lot of troubled kids. Kids that have lives I could never have imagined. Mark has to become counselor, referee, best friend, male role model, chauffeur, you name it he is it, in addition to husband, father, paper plate maker, teacher/preacher youth pastor.

Don't get me wrong, I am not meaning to complain. I am just saying that I never thought being involved in ministry could be so hard. We care so much about these kids and there are certain situations that we have no control in changing. Like tonight, a kid goes home from church and finds his dad on floor. The kid first thought the dad was dead; he was drunk, again. This kid has seen his mom walk out on the family. His older sister is in college. His grandmother just died. And his dad gets drunk. The kid pretends to be all tough, wearing black and listening to hard rock music. But inside he is still just a hurt little boy who needs his parents. We pray for him. We love him. But what can we do really for him? We were talking to him tonight, but truly what can you say? It is easy for one of us to say "things will get better, just hang in there buddy" when we are here with our family that is together and everybody loves one another.

So there you have it. All those years I spent listening to missionaries from cool places and I am now only an hour or so from where I grew up. I never knew then that the coolest place to be would be so close to home.