In your job with youth, you experience both the fun/joy of seeing students make beautiful decisions toward maturity in faith and poor decisions leading to pain and frustration. In this blog, I’d like to hear of the fun/joy and how it energizes you to “stay in the game.”

I started my journey of leading youth when I was only 17 years old, and co-led a group of grade 6 girls at our local church’s youth group. Those girls have now graduated from high school and are living fruitful, independent lives. With my current role now, I had the honour of starting a youth ministry from its infancy at our newest church plant – and I get to do it all over again! Don’t read that in a ton of regret, but rather excitement and anticipation. But let’s also be real in saying I don’t miss having all grade 6’s.

I’m still in my first decade of youth ministry, so my journey is still young, but in the experience I do have, I have felt the most heartbreak and the most joy through the interactions with the youth I do life with – I still don’t know how I can feel polar opposite feelings, yet I know it’s real.

The joys are what keep me going. I often think about the image of storing those joyous moments in a treasure box in my heart so that I can look back at them during the times I feel like I’m walking through mud.

Currently, my treasure box is glowing with cherished moments. Let me go back to my first small group. They could probably single handedly burst my heart open! My co-leaders and I constantly tell them that what they have in a small group is SO rare – and that’s not at all a prideful comment on the way we led the group. The bond they share is definitely not from our doing, but a gracious gift from God. Many of them head of to camp together in the summers to love on and teach young kids about the faith that they hold tight to; a group of them serve together in the preschool and kids ministry at our church; they plan get-togethers just to be present in each other’s lives; and they encourage and challenge one another in their faith. I think of Hebrews 10:24, “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds”. That is what I see when I see them.

When I think back on the 7 years of life together, the current outcome is what I desired for them as a group, yet I remember wrestling over how to create that. How do you create environments that foster community? How do you encourage and challenge them in their faith, which then translates to them encouraging and challenging each other?

The crazy thing is that I still don’t have the formula. And that’s probably because there is no formula. Sure, there are some strategic moves you can make as a youth leader, but the love they have for one another is proof that God was in the center of it all. It was a loooooong seven years – don’t even get me started about grade 6! Yet the story we share as a small group is one I hold on to when I’m in the thick of things with youth – there is always hope.

The other aspect of working with youth that gets me more excited than chocolate ice cream is watching them find their gifting. I have one student right now who’s helping on our church tech team, and he’s realizing he has this gift that can be used to serve in the church. Another one of my students has a heart for advocating for the oppressed – it just blows my mind as I watch her passionately talk about the injustices in the world and what she wants to do about it. There’s another student who has an incredible gift of teaching, and she’s diving deeper into that at our weekly kids after school program. Then there are the two students who are exploring the idea of having a gift of creating a program to lead a group of kids through.

Dare I go on?

(If only you could sense the excitement bubbling through my veins as I think about all of the students I get to journey with!)

There are so many messages in society today that restrict the next generation from discovering their God given gifts – gifts that we NEED in our world. When a student is given the space to be able to discover what that may be, and when they realize that they can live for more than just the American dream, mountains can be moved. What a joy it is to be able to be part of that movement.

I wish I could journey with them all and help them discover those gifts, but instead I have committed to doing for even just one. And that one has the power to make me dance with joy. If I’m being even more real, the process of writing this blog helped me re-live the dance since my heart temporarily forgot the music. But that’s a blog for another day.

To conclude, another joy of working with the next generation is those I get to lead with. I’m thankful for friends and the broader community of others who share a similar passion. It’s an encouragement to know that we’re in this together, and to share stories with each other about the ways we see youth thrive.

Basically, the world needs to prepare themselves for the upcoming generation – they’re going to do, and are currently doing, some amazing things!