Earning the Right to Be Heard

Read: 1 Thessalonians 1-2

You'd think that since I spent 1.25 years in youth ministry I would be familiar with this idea. I'm not really at all, amazingly enough. When I came into my position at JKPC the kids there already knew me and then they automatically gave me the right to be heard because I was their new leader, had some new/interesting things to say I suppose, and they're nice kids. This was very good for a non-trained leader who is still soaking wet behind the ears but in some ways I got off a little too easy by not needing to earn the right to be heard by them. I suppose in some ways that I still had to earn that right, and we had some kids become involved who I didn't have much contact prior to becoming the official leader, but still, I never thought about how much work goes into earning that right.

And that's where 1 Thess. 2:9-12 comes in to play. The first sentence of that paragraph explains it all: "You remember us in those days, friends, working our fingers to the bone, up half the night, moonlighting so you wouldn't have the burden of supporting us while we proclaimed God's Message to you."

As I've yammered about constantly, I'm standing on the edge of the diving board overlooking the Young Life pool. Already I'm making excuses as to why I may not be able to fully commit and why it may not be worth doing. This is something scary to me and it's out of my comfort zone in a lot of ways. But this is also what I dream of doing, what I feel God has called me to be doing. Maybe not professionally right now (or ever), but I still haven't lost my desire to show teenagers another, better way than the way of the world and to use my talents that make my demonstration and example a unique and worthwhile one.

This YL experience I'm about to breach might be the kind of hammering that Joel mentioned in his "Stakes" post. I'd like to think it's a sort of refining fire; burning away the dross (love that word) and leaving the pure. It's a necessary thing, even God's Message has to do that: "Be assured that when we speak to you we're not after crowd approval--only God approval. Since we've been put through the battery of tests, you're guaranteed that both we and the Message are free of error, mixed motives, or hidden agendas" (2:4-5).

It's never easy with God and I suppose that should make us thankful. It's hard to say we'd like to redo the really awful crap we've been through but when we've squeezed those experiences dry for all the lessons they can teach us, we're almost tempted to say it. What it comes down to, I believe, is that we can rest comfortably in the knowledge that God loves us and accepted who we were. But, more than that, he loves us enough to not let us stay that way.

(I stole that last bit 'cause it's so good!)