Tag: spirituality

my anniversary present

I’ve been hounding Lindsay for a couple of years now, and she finally buckled. On Monday she brought this home for me 🙂 She was going to buy me one for my birthday but I told her not to. We just didn’t have the money. We were going to go out of town for a few days to celebrate year #2, but we ended up staying in town, which saved us at least a few hundred bucks.

So she, being an amazing wife, spent that extra money on this. My justification for spending this much money was that DOZENS of my students own an Xbox, and now we can play each other live online. Or they can come over and play. And nothing shows a student that you love them more than blowing them up with a grenade in a video game.

anniversary-present

why I am a youth pastor

I was vicious in high school.

I hated school. I hated authority. I might have hated you. I was really good at hate.

But… here’s the thing- I think I had more passion then than I do now.

I was very good at what I did back then.

I was remarkably destructive.

And that’s partly why I am a pastor to high school students.

Because teenagers are capable of causing so much damage.

I want to redirect all of that destructive potential towards the things of G0d.

I want to give them something better to be angry about.

I want to tell every parent that comes to my office to be optimistic, because I know that their child is in God’s hand, no matter how far they run.

—-this concludes my late-night rant

how does that make you feeeel?

how does that make you feel

Last week we finished up a pretty heavy teaching series at our Wednesday night gathering… so last night we decided to pause. We reviewed the past few weeks of topics, and then asked the students a question or two: How does that make you feel? How does this all sit with you? If you had to pick a word or two that would describe your spiritual posture right now what would it be?

We covered the room in butcher paper, played three songs on the iPod, let them grab a marker and go. Here are a few of the things they said they were feeling:

loving, warm, happy, confident, guilty, irritated, fooled, tired, stressed, despondent, sexy, spastic, forlorn (wow), betrayed, confused, exuberant, victorious, refreshed, appreciative, hungover, dooped, detached, forgotten, overwhelmed, amazed, ashamed, alone, beastlike, unwanted, encouraged, whatever, damaged, blessed, boxed in, uneasy, guarded, happy and sad at the same time.

Wow.

That’s just a handful of them… there were dozens more. All in one room. All hearing one message… but all receiving it from completely unique places.