When you’re 3, you ask “why?”  Why is the sky blue?  Why do only mommies have babies?  Why did God make that monkey’s butt look like that?

Then you get your questions answered and you trust everything you were told.  Adults know stuff kids don’t and they don’t need google, they have you… and you’re super smart.

Then somewhere between 12 and 14… somebody flips a switch. (probably located somewhere on that monkey’s butt) And virtually over night, you’re not smart and they have questions again. Lots of questions.  And if you once told them Noah was a cute story about animals who went two by two into a giant floating boat Noah made, then they want to know why you lied to them.  Because they read their big people bible without the pictures and it said that God flooded the whole world and they have watched the news and seen floods and people drowning and the story’s not cute anymore.

About this time, adults get sick of teens cynical questions, label them as rebellious misfits, and cast them aside, hoping they’ll grow out of it soon.  They don’t trust our answers verbatim anymore and they have questions about questions and then adults get fed up with it and start throwing around the “because I said so” clause… which only makes them more cynical and well… the path keeps on keeping on until they hit 30 when they may or may not return to what they once believed when they were 5.

So… if you want to know what teens need to know… it’s not an issue of “what?”, it’s an issue of “why?”… and if that answer to why results in “because xyz said so”, don’t be surprised when they chuck it in search of something that actually holds water.  Don’t teach students what to think, teach them how to think. 

If you have a teen in your home or if you’re in any kind of mentoring relationship with a teen, here’s some thoughts about helping them answer the “why” question.

• Resist the temptation to answer hard questions with easy answers.  “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is not simple or even solvable.  Don’t be trite or flippant.  Pull back the ugly covers and wrestle in the real mud of life with them.  It’s time for the deep end of the pool where those who don’t drown, must humbly learn to tread water.  It’s a myth that their are rocks to stand on down there.  It’s faith for everyone. 
• Don’t judge their questions.  It doesn’t matter how certain you are of the answer, if you don’t help them honestly wrestle with their own uncertainty, you’ve just put a bandaid on an ulcer.  It’s not gonna do much beyond cover it up.
• Celebrate doubt.  When a student starts doubting, they start thinking.  I honestly want students to doubt.  I want them to doubt what they hear on TV, what the media spews, what I say, even what the Bible teaches. I want them to wrestle with it to the core. It’s a critical thinking skill. Until they do, they have nothing worth defending and no honest conviction to live by. Without it, they are naive and susceptible to any smooth talking charismatic sales pitch of fads or faith. I’m convinced that healthy adults see doubt in the life of a teen as tool God uses to shape faith. 
• Spend less time telling students what to do or what God says they should do and more time asking them, “why do you do what you do?”  In their teen years, it’s way less important that they know what you think than it is that they are forced to figure out what they think and why they think it.  If a student is dating someone, ask them “why are you two dating?”  Don’t ask in front of their date, but don’t be surprised if you get a blank stare like you’re crazy for asking such a question.  But don’t settle.  Really… seriously, press them for what they see in this person, what they hope to get out of this relationship, and why they felt like they were ready to date. You may not agree with their answers, but your goal isn’t to get them to stop dating or to take your position.  Your goal is to help, even force them, to wrestle with the real issues of life.
• Redefine failure.  Failure in the life of a teen is not avoided by constant success.  Failure is not falling short, it’s failing to learn from it… or worse yet, failing to be given a chance to fail in the first place.  Failure is not a poor choice, it’s the inability of adults and mentors to seize that opportunity as a chance to wrestle with they “why” question that is the true failure.  Failure is part of life.  Those who succeed learn to deal with failure, wrestle it to the ground, learn from it, and move forward wiser because of it.  When adults only tell students what to do, we are doing so because we fear what will happen if they get it wrong.  When adults help students decide “why” we do what we do, then we don’t operate out of fear, but out of license.  Failure becomes a teacher of why, not a mistake to punish.   (SIDE NOTE THAT MIGHT HELP: I have this phrase I use when talking to parents about this, I tell them, “give your student enough rope to trip on, but not enough to hang themselves. Be wise. But be risky too.”) 

Adolescence has become a lifestyle instead of just a life stage.  You can read about this in study after study in America.

• I wrote about it here back in August where I referenced a book and a New York Times article I had recently read. 
• Last week the Wall Street Journal hosted another article called, “Where have the good men gone” in which college age women complain about dating “men” who are merely boys in adult bodies.  One author writes:

I guess I can’t really speak for all of America or all of youth culture or whatever on this one.

But I will simply say from my own experience over the past 6 years at Journey at least… we don’t just have an absentee dad issue, we have an absentee adult issue.. and it’s at Epidemic levels.

Here’s some cold hard realities of my world:

• it’s simply not possible to have the lasting faith impact we desire in a student’s life in a 1 on 50 ratio, like what we often have in our Sunday program.  This is ridiculous. 
• the prevalence of our teen subculture has resulted in the reality that students no longer have consistent access to caring adults
• just when we most need adults to be stepping into the lives of students, the vast majority are stepping away out of fear, annoyance, or ambivalence to them.
• students don’t need peers as much as they need mentors

This week I’ll do 5 posts on 5 recent convictions I’m reinforcing in my own life about those who work with and minister to students.

First up: encouragement is too rare… and very powerful! 


(side note: I’ll be really honest in this post.  But please hear this, I’m not fishing for an encouraging word.)

Here goes:

For the past few years I’ve had the privilege of teaching a seminar at a couple of national youth ministry conferences.  Each year, I’m asked to pitch some thoughts on seminars that might be of interest to the audience of my peers.  This last fall I pitched one to YS that I’m teaching again in a few weeks at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference called “You Suck: Enduring, Learning from, and Responding to criticism and conflict“.  I cannot begin to explain to you how refreshing this seminar was for those who attended it and how sad it was that we all have this wreckage of harsh criticism in common.

Truth is, I have a super long list of illustrations for this one. In fact, over a decade ago, after a particularly hard season in ministry, I actually went into my senior pastor’s office and resigned.  I’m in ministry today in part because he refused to accept my resignation, but I was definitely down for the count.

Student ministry can be brutally hard in certain seasons.  Ask any parent of a teen, and they’ll tell you it feels like a roller coaster of emotions and confusion. Cuz it is.  And therefore, it’s hard on everyone, including the students.  No joke… without fail, I bet any single weekend in our youth ministry, I could find you at least one teen either crying in our room or on the brink of a breakdown.  Every single Sunday.  Some Sundays, it’s more than I can bear.  I just leave and cry myself.

When I first arrived at Journey about 6 years ago, we had an 8:30 am and a 10:30 am service at church and in our high school program too. Our 8:30 was shockingly much larger than the 10:30.  So much so, that of the 15 or so students who came to the 10:30 service, about 14 looked and acted like they were forced to be there.  I used to go into the bathroom between services and look myself in the mirror and at 32 years old, psych myself up to enter the room.  I quietly called it “preaching to detention center”.  And each Sunday, after service I’d walk across the parking lot and quit… and then re-hire myself on Monday morning.

More recently, a mom came to observe our high school group on the weekend because her daughter was playing in the band.  A few days later, she sent me a very sincere and encouraging e-mail.   I decided to send it to my lead pastor as an encouragement to him, that God was working on our church campus.  He then blogged about it.  The following day, seemingly independent of that, I received 4 more affirmations.  One from a dad who sat through our weekend “sex talk” and thanked me for how I dealt with the subject.  Another parent sent me a facebook message for the same reason after hearing her kids talk about it in the car ride home.  Then another mom thanked me for a convo I had with her daughter and finally, another mom called my cell to say, “ditto 100 times over” to what the mom said in Ed’s blog post.

Super nice. Way powerful words my soul drank deeply from.

But honestly, super rare.  I seriously think this much independent encouragement in such a short window of time was a ministry first for me.

My wife and I are “joking” that it’s the calm before the storm. I must have a pile of criticism coming around the corner.

Regardless, just know this:

If you have a teen in your life, they desperately need an encouraging word from you.  Seriously, NO ONE, is regularly telling 90% of the teens around me how much they are loved.  But that’s another post.  Please, encourage a high school teen today. They already get plenty of criticism from their peers anyway. They are largely encouragement starved as a generation.

Second, if you know someone who is making a positive influence into a teen: either a parent or a teacher or a coach or a pastor or a small group leader or… you name it.  Trust me.  It’s hard. And IT’S WAY TOO RARE that anyone says “Thanks.  You are making a world of impact. Keep doing what you’re doing. We need you.”  

I can’t even begin to tell you how desperately our souls need it.

Every weekend for the past 3 years we have challenged our high school students to bring in a $1 a week for an offering.  It’s stupid really, like American chump change. It’s a dollar. It’s really not a stretch for 99% of our San Diego crowd.  But believe it or not, it’s a rare weekend when our high school offering actually amounts to $1 times the number of warm bodies in the room.  But we keep pushing it every week and reminding them of the difference they can make with just a little effort to help us stack hands together in this.

We use the dollar a week to sponsor 3 kids through world vision (Zambia, El Salvador, and India), an orphanage in Uganda, and a child we visit once or twice a year in Tecate, Mexico.  With that money, we can provide monthly food, shelter, education, and medicine.

This year, I vowed that at Christmas, none of these kids would go without a Christmas present.  So, for the world vision kids, we sent $75 each.  We also were told that this gift would be used to bless not just the kids we sponsor, but the community they live in via the World Vision workers too.  But I had no idea how true that would really be.

We have started receiving letters and pictures back telling us what they did with the money and each time I read a letter and see the pictures, I cry.  I can’t believe how much difference a mere $75 can make.

See for yourself.

LUYANDO IN ZAMBIA, AFRICA got a new umbrella, new clothes, and new bed for herself, a goat for her family, and several other gifts that were given to her community.

RUBY IN INDIA.  Well, the letter said it’s cold there now and people need blankets.  So, we bought Ruby one.  Oh… and EVERY KID in her village got one too!!  I have 2 pictures like this.  Are you kidding me?  EVERY KID got a blanket!  I sent how much again?  Oh yeah….  75 stupid bucks.

It’s crazy what $75 can do.

It’s crazy what I normally do with $75.

It’s awesome that our world is so small that we can change the life of a kid 10,000 miles away.

It’s ridiculous that living standards are so varied on this planet and that I have the power to radically alter that.