Christian Living

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This past semester as I’ve diving into my first chapter of being a religion major, I’ve gotten involved with the middle school age group at my church. I approached my friend who interns at the church about getting involved and he told me that the biggest “need” was for middle school volunteers. Honestly, my heart wasn’t into it at all when I started. I viewed it as a ‘foot-in-the-door’ stage. Sunday’s became very crowded for me. I dreaded them! It got to the point where I would arrive at church at 9:00 on a sunday morning and would be there until 6:30 at night with a 90 minute break for lunch. And it really caused my ministry to hinder.
I realized that I had spread myself too thin and that I wasn’t really committing to any of them. The three that I was involved with (Middle school youth, First Priority, young adult worship service on sunday nights) turned into boxes on a checklist. When Saturday nights came, I dreaded what was to come of the next day. I started to hate Sundays. I was grumpy, worn out, and looked for any excuse to skip out on my volunteer work.
But then in October, something changed. Lee (the overseer of the middle school youth) wanted to have a capture the flag night. I put on a fake smile and let him know how ‘excited’ I was. I felt obligated to show up early so I arrived at 5:00 to help build the bonfire. Now something you have to keep in mind: I’m the best person in the world at being fake. It’s definitely not a gift because typically gifts are seen as things that will give positive outcomes. But anytime I’ve needed to appear as a perfectly healthy Christian, I’ve been able to pull it off with ease. Boy could I trick them!
So here I was standing in the field of my church at 5:00 on a Saturday night talking to lee but thinking about all the other things I could be doing. I knew that as a leader, I’d have to be here until about 9:30-10:00. At this point in the semester, I wasn’t excited about doing middle school stuff at all. I didn’t have a heart for it and I hadn’t really made any connections with the students. I was strongly considering finding another church to save myself the pride of going up to my intern friend and quitting the position.
God used that night however. I don’t know what happened but it was one of the best nights of the semester for me. I talked with a lot of the guys there and finally felt like I had made a few connections. I even argued with one of them because he kept complaining about how everyone was cheating, even though he himself had cheated and put a stop to the game. But the funny thing is after the argument he apologized and we became good friends after that.
I walked away from the capture the flag night excited. It was the first time that semester that I got a glimpse of the joy that can come from youth ministry. It wasn’t until that following Sunday that I discovered the friendships I had made. As I stood in the Fusion room greeting students, a few students actually came up to me to talk! Whether it was bragging about their performance in CTF on friday night or about a high score in a video game that they beat the night before, they were ramblin’.
After that sunday school, for the first time all semester, I walked away excited. I think that I had finally realized why Jeremy (the youth pastor) had invested so many years of his life into these students without getting burnt out. I realized why my old youth pastor Jake turned down positions senior pastoring a church to continue with his ministry at fusion. And the funny thing is, though that first month was difficult to connect with the students, now it seems almost too easy. It’s like a good friend of mine once said “Talk to a middle schooler for ten minutes and you’re his favorite person in the world for a month.”
But the reason I’m more writing this chapter is to talk about a particular incident where one of the middle schoolers taught me something. It happened very recently actually. I walked into the church service right before it started to where the middle schoolers were sitting. There was a quiet one sitting off to the side of the others named Stanley. He is a very meek student with a gentle heart. I walked up to him and stopped.
“Is anyone sitting next to you Stan?”
“No! You can sit there.” He replied.
I took a seat next to him and plopped my book bag under my seat. I glanced over my focal point for a second and looked around for friends. After a few seconds, I too notice of what Stanley was doing. He had gotten out the comment card and written his name and checked ‘regular attender’. He flipped it over and checked ‘yes’ next to ‘do you have a prayer request?’ And in his seventh grade handwriting he wrote “the salvation of evan Leobondo”. The way he filled out the comment card made it obvious that it was a weekly habit for him. It made me wonder how many weeks in a row he had asked for support in prayer of his friend Evan.
Stanley’s prayer request reminded me of me of a similar thing I did when I was a sophomore in high school. I had a friend at the time who was struggling with his faith because of his father’s recent re-diagnosis of cancer. For two months straight, I wrote it as a prayer request on the comment card and would spend time everyday praying for him. And when I thought about my friend, I thought about when and why I stopped praying for him. To this day, he’s still struggling with his faith. So why have i stopped praying for him?
Stanley’s prayer request caused myself to question what has happened to my faith. Though i know I’ve grown in my faith since sophomore year, I must have lost part of it too....And that’s when I finally understood what Jesus was referring to when he said that you need “faith like a child to enter the kingdom” (Mark 10:15). Today, as a sophomore in college I’d feel too silly to write something as simple as praying for a non-christian friend of mine. Maybe it’s from seeing so many of my friends not get saved after years of praying for them. Or it might just be my mindset of prayer has molded from the magical picture depicted in the heroic bible stories to an image that the world has grasped hold of.
I wish I was as naïve as Stanley. Getting older and experiencing the world causes the world to rub off on us a little bit. We get to a point where we aren’t able to believe that the fairy tales from the bible can actually happen in our lives. We aren’t impressed by bible stories anymore. We hear the same stories over and over so much that they lose their value. It’s like someone being swallowed by a giant fish for three days and spit back out alive and well has turned into an everyday thing!
I remember a few years ago helping with some friends on a saturday afternoon at a rundown apartment complex. One day every month we would go down and play with the kids and have lunch with them. At the end we would tell them a bible story using visuals. One particular saturday we told the story of Moses parting the red sea. A friend and I both held up pieces of notebook paper that said “red sea” on them and a third friend ran through the middle of us. It was a fun way to tell the story and the students seemed really amazed by it. They kept asking questions about how he did it and how it worked. The kids really understood what God did in that situation. He split water in half! I hear that story now and it has lost its effect on my emotions. Even at the young age of nineteen, I’ve lost that aspect of childlike awe.
Sometimes we mistake growing up with being more logical. But I think in a spiritual realm, God wants the opposite. As we grow in our faith, he wants us to come closer and closer to a point where we believe the irrational can happen; to believe that people really can be healed, or raised from the dead, or find God in such a messed up lifestyle.
That’s why the book of Acts is so distant from what the church is today. I don’t think that the biblical church isn’t reachable. We pray prayers for miracles but maybe our hearts don’t really believe a spiritual intervention will take place because so many of our prayers of the past haven’t been answered in the way we wanted them to. We’ve learned to trust in the world too much. I think that what separates us from performing the same miracles and really spreading to our community like the church of Acts is our Adult-like faith.

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