I'm writing a country song. It's called, "I need to buy a home, my wife needs a contract, our dog only has one testicle, and the Twins have the worst record in baseball." It's about the plight of the modern working man; very Woody Guthrie. What's a man gotta do these days to get a home, and a job, and an extra puppy nugget, and a couple of Joe Mauer home runs?
We spent all weekend at Covenant Pines with a dozen junior high students. That's actually going to be the title of my song. That does a better job at striking at the heart of my malaise. Wait, looking up "malaise". No, that isn't right. Pococurante. That's what I'm feeling. I'd like to thank Thesaurus.com for diagnosing today's affect.
Something about those kids last weekend just sucked the life out of me. While I was being lanced by hay, riding in a trailer down a bumpy road, in the cold, in the dark, while listening to a 13-year-old complain for the trillionth time, I had this revelation. An anti-revelation, really. It was this moment of faux-clarity, when I saw -- very clearly -- Youth Ministry as nothing more than this elaborate scam. It was a tapestry of lies, weaving religion and culture with camping and hayrides, all knit together to trick guys like me into watching other people's teenagers for the weekend. Cynical, I know, but hard to ignore when you're in the middle of a cold, dark, complaint-riddled hayride.
It's not that I'm pretty sure I was ineffective as a speaker, or ignored as a teacher, or mocked as a leprechaun who is likely to ingest his own fecal matter. That stuff is par for the Modern Teenager Course. I think it's that there was so little silver lining. The kids who did open up, share, learn, they opened up about big problems, tough issues. There was no, "Oh, now I understand Jesus in a more real and personal way" moment. The real and personal moments were about the deaths of loved ones, the drug use of a parent, the thoughts of suicide, the doubting of their faith in the face of a world that seems upside down.
And how do you respond to to that, when you're pretty sure that what they're describing isn't some rough patch, but actually a pretty apt representation of life on this planet? How do you describe GOD to someone when you're pretty sure they know you have no way of describing such a thing? That the faith of a child gets soured and stretched into the apathetic doubt of a teenager, from whence it grows and matures into the befuddled doctrine of a twenty-something?
It just feels like a lot.
I Heart You.
