My daughter was leaning in close to the iPad screen for our video call, putting all her weight on her table topping forearms when her balance shifted backward and gravity took over. She slid off the table in an instant and out of my view.

She’s always doing this. Falling down. What follows is an half-embarrassed, half-pleased-with-herself grin. But several seconds passed and she didn’t come back onto the screen. Her mother called to her from across the room and she didn’t respond. It was only when she came close that my wife detected that something wasn’t right. She started screaming for me to call 911.

That was four hours ago. Daughter is okay; she fractured her skull, but it’s not a displaced fracture and there is no bleeding. I’m on the first plane to her in the morning, hoping to outrun the sound of her mother’s screaming and the crushing weight of helplessness that hangs onto you when your child is injured miles away from you. It’s what I fell I need to do.

Apart from me, though, practically dozens of people have staked their own well being to mine and my family’s this evening in a way that makes crystal clear for me the good things we’ve been given in our life. While my wife was speeding to the ER, I made one phone call and sent one text, and within half an hour two pastors–former colleagues–were by her side. One of them is staying the night in an as-yet-undetermined ICU. Two college students, former youth group stalwarts who are now leaders, called and had to be talked out of rushing to the hospital themselves.

Meanwhile, my people–the colleague group that is in constant daily communication over Facebook Messenger–prayed with me and sat with me well past midnight, when the CT results came back. My wife’s family has a Messenger group too, and that swung into action with prayers and attendant waiting.

And I’ve just sent the email to my newest colleagues asking them to excuse me for a week they hadn’t planned on. I hate doing that, and yet I’m not hesitating to do that.

I don’t expect to blog much the next several days. Let this word of gratitude stay here in the meantime, then: Krista, Karen, Courtney, Landon, Brian, Marci, Chad, Libby, Rick, Barbara, Donna, Sandra, John, Nathan, Bekah, Alejandro, Angel, Chuey, Shannon, Shelly, and Katie. I’m grateful for you. You’re saving my life right now.

My former colleague ran a great series of trainings for her Sunday School volunteers she called “Confabs” that happened about three times a year. They were hands-on, instructional, and interactive. The staff got as much out of them as the volunteers.

With a nod to Krista Wuertz, then, I’m planning a “Confab” for all of our youth leaders next August. The Doodle poll went out this week.

Tell me what you think of this: we need to be developing as leaders in three distinct areas–skills, knowledge, and connections.

We need to sharpen our youth ministry skills for designing Bible studies, leading small groups, conducting large group games, and a host of other things that effective youth leaders do well. These are the things that most intimidate prospective leaders, who say things like, “I don’t know how to work with teenagers.” It’s not rocket science. This is how.

We also need to broaden our knowledge of adolescent development, social media, theology, Bible, and emerging cultural postures, so that our work with teens is informed and so that it can change in response to new learning or deepening reflection.

Finally, we need stronger connections to one another as leaders. That’s a matter of development, because so much youth ministry work proceeds from the relationships enjoyed by the adults doing the work. A huge part of what makes Tapestry effective, for example, is the community of leader relationships that expand and grow. Developing youth leaders means connecting them more deeply to one another; isolated leaders aren’t effective.

I’m putting the Confab together now, so I’m eager to hear what you guys think about this and to learn of material you find useful in leader development work.

When you spot your co-worker in the Chicago Avenue Red Line station just this side of 10 pm on a week night, striding as intently toward the train as you are away from it, and your paths are set to cross in three . . . two . . . one . . .

Don’t stop. Don’t take out your headphones so that he takes out his and the two of you exchange idle chit chat. The man’s got a train to catch.

Instead, just raise your right arm high, open-palmed, toward him, and don’t break stride. He won’t either, so that the collision of your palms will announce a collegial, even fraternal understanding to everyone in that train station with a CLAP to signal that, whatever else you lack right now, you’ve for sure got that guy.

Don’t engage a compliment built on an insult of someone else. The person who is quietly weighing you against somebody else and finding you superior isn’t doing you any favors by telling you that. If you allow their verdict to tickle your ears they’ve got you. Plus, some other person is getting diminished, unchallenged by you, and that’s not a win either.

No, don’t engage. Make it clear that negative chatter will find no audience with you.

My mother would have none of this kind of behavior. When I, a self-righteous pre-teen, complained about my father in the hopes of some maternal sympathy, that he was making me wash the dishes when it was indisputably my brother’s turn, she would barely look up from her ashtray and intone, “So do the dishes.” No amount of incredulous gasping moved the needle. She never engaged.

You shouldn’t either.

The Macarthur Foundation has been funding research into teenagers’ use of digital media since 2008, and if you’re not tracking their findings you’re missing out. This is important, nuanced, evidence-based stuff that anybody who works with teenagers should grapple with.

Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living And Learning with New Media came out in 2009, and I eagerly recruited a couple of high school students to help me teach it to the adults in our church. Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens followed in 2014. I taught that to grown ups too (next to Douglas Rushkoff, danah boyd is my biggest brain crush).

Now here comes another book out of all that research: The Class: Living And Learning in The Digital Age by Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green. I ordered a copy today and will jump at the first chance to get into it with grown ups.

The authors followed 13-year-olds for a year to observe their use of digital media. Their findings throw cold water on alarmist fears about teenagers addicted to smartphones who are unable to sustain face-to-face conversations. Livingstone wrote a little summary here, but I’ll tell you a couple of her most promising insights now.

First, teens’ use of social media is less about the impulse to be “always on” than it is about exercising some agency over their relationships with adults. If was about being on all the time they would be far more responsive to digital media demands being made by teachers and other adults. Messaging is a tool for disconnecting from adults, not for interacting with them (my refusal to use Snapchat is vindicated!)

Second, teens prefer face-to-face interaction. They seek it out, and they prolong it for as long as possible when they have it. They may be interacting with phones when they’re together, but being together is the substance of what they most want to be doing.

This is important work, and I can’t wait to read through it all. Big ups to Cory Doctorow and BoingBoing for their coverage of it.

“People are too busy” justifies the status quo. A narrative of busyness discourages risk and connection because we decide out-of-hand that people are already overbooked. A midweek gathering of youth for community building and faith formation sounds great, but who has the time?

We need to poke around inside this busy claim a little bit. How busy are people, really? And how many of them? Surely some of them have said yes to soccer and theater and AP Calculus to the point that they couldn’t fit another activity, even if they wanted to. I’m pretty sure I’m overestimating how many of my people are in that particular boat, though. I’m also pretty sure I’m too contentedly abandoning people to that boat as it sinks.

The risk of inviting busy people to connect is that they will be unable to consider your invitation for all the better ones they’ve already received, and you will feel rejected. They’re good people. They like the idea. They looooove you. They just can’t make the time out of all the other good ideas and great people they’re already committed to. That you can make the time? Right, there’s the risk: the conclusion that you must not have anything more important to do.

Those who work with busy teenagers literally have nothing more important to do than invite them into connection: with their peers; with adults who are interested in them; with a religious tradition and its texts and habits; with their selves; with God. This is what we have to be working on.

Even amidst the busiest communities, there will always be a hunger for this, and abandoning people to their busyness is an abdication of our calling. There are teenagers in the bustling crowd who are searching for connection and belonging. We fail them if we allow their peers’ busyness to drive all our programming.

We also fail their overextended peers when we defer to that activity load and choose not to plan new things, because they may be looking for deeper and more authentic community. They may care more about learning to love their neighbor than they care about learning how to get into Harvard, they just don’t have the invitation to prove it yet.

I broke something of great value the other day, something that does not belong to me. That’s not a metaphor. There is a thing that belongs to someone else, and through clumsiness and a lack of attention, I ran into it and it broke. Like, B-R-O-K-E.

I lay on the floor for a moment taking in the damage, stunned. My appendages were all accounted for, and blood was not flowing. Damn. That was my first thought: I would feel so much better about this if I were injured.

My daughter was there, so my attention turned to her. It was she who asked for me. She set the breakage in motion, didn’t she? Maybe I would feel better if I blamed the episode on her.

Nothing doing there. All that was left was to report the breakage to the owner. His face registered both the value of the object and the seriousness of the damage. Maybe I would feel better if I berated myself in his presence. Maybe I should let loose my self-loathing in the living room.

When we break something, it is tempting to hide in sympathy, in blame, or even in flagellation of ourselves. By hiding, we shelter ourselves from the impact of our mistake, be it intentional or accidental. That impact has to go somewhere, though, and hiding from it forces it onto other people–innocent bystanders, or even the people we’ve hurt.

If you broke it say so. With a straight face. And your hands in your pockets. Apologize. Then stop talking.

And of course, be more careful.

Our environments act upon us. No amount of awareness will stop that. Nearly every place we inhabit has been designed by some figure behind a curtain to elicit from us a response: home, store, theater, church.

My wife called me a “Stick in the mud” last night during a play, when the actors broke the fourth wall and invited audience members to take selfies and dance the cha-cha. I wasn’t into it. I like my theater scripted, with me not in it. I forced a half-hearted smile and mostly watched.

Maybe it’s easier to be comfortable in an obviously manipulated environment if you haven’t experienced the political or religious extremes of that practice. Maybe sitting through dozens of carefully choreographed altar calls breeds an allergy to having your environment manipulated.

We should study the tricks of advertising so we can spot when it’s being done to us. But it’s always being done to us, and sometimes going along is the better part. Sometimes the figure behind the curtain isn’t malevolent. The actors in the theater last night weren’t selling anything or converting anyone; they were constructing an environment for connection and a shared experience, and I missed it.

We want to recognize the figure behind the curtain and to identify which levers she’s pulling. That’s healthy. But there will be times when we need to trust her too.