Preparation is toward fulfillment of the objective. Preparation is not toward perfection.

Measure the success of your preparation less in terms of polish and more in terms of proficiency. Did the thing you made do the job you made it to do? Then that’s enough.

Could it do the job better? Optimize and enhance by all means, then. But keep the objective in sight. Don’t be distracted by sheen. If the sheen is what people notice about your work, it’s probably not having the kind of impact you want it to.

All this to say I have a volunteer training event this weekend that needs to accomplish some important objectives. Impressing the participants with slick presentation, however, is not one of them.

https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381

This is a swift little book and powerful. There are some gaps between it’s central claim (the individualism of modern life is destroying people) and a robust body of data, but Junger’s observations are prescient enough to warrant careful attention. 

Here’s my favorite anecdote from the book: a man urges a young body to stop picking the legs off of spiders. “Why?” the boy asks. “Spiders don’t feel pain.” 

The man’s reply will stick you ‘tween the eyes. “It’s not the spider I’m worried about.” 

Guilt is a developmental milestone. The capacity for contrition when you’ve done something you shouldn’t have or failed to do something you should have done signals maturity. The absence of remorse is a maturity problem.

But the ability to move beyond guilt is also a developmental milestone. Wallowing in shame becomes something of a convenience after awhile, a justification to not make new choices and embrace new commitments, because, well, look what you did.

I know some very mature, very spiritually healthy people, who have sketchy pasts but have moved through guilt about them to honest resolve; they’re more motivated by a vision of the future–a better them, a better world–than they are by some disgraced posture of lifelessness.

I want to be like those people.

Youth ministry involves stewarding relationships between teenagers. The youth I work with are enmeshed in multiple networks of relationships at the same time, including those in their family, at school, online social networks, and teammates. Their relationships with one another at church rarely overlap with their relationships in those other spheres.

So we have an opportunity to cultivate friendships that are grounded in a shared story and shared habits of worship and community. While we pray for all of our students’ relationships to be characterized my mutual concern, selflessness, and common commitment, we work to develop those characteristics when we’re together.

I think doing that requires a balance of emotional closeness and emotional distance. I’ve been at retreats with groups of youth who were downright frosty with one another, and I’ve been on mission trips with teens who couldn’t stand to be apart. Neither of those are good. In healthy relationships among teenagers at church, emotional closeness should never be an end in itself. Youth group and mission trips should bring them closer to one another and should bond them (if not there’s something wrong), but I fear that if closeness is not in service of something greater (Discipleship), it can be contorted into a force that doesn’t build faith but undermines it.

Yes, friends are friends forever. But the best friends work together toward something bigger than their friendship.

My first blog was a mess. Unfocused, indulgent, not very interesting to read: it was an outlet for a fear that maybe I should have been doing something else with my life than failing to turn around a dwindling congregation. It was desperate.

But it produced this, which I used the other day in a sermon and which has prompted a few hours worth of recollection and reflection since.

A blog is still as good a tool as you’ll find for building a body of work that will impact who knows who, including you.

 

Another parenting post.

We instituted some new guidelines in our house for Daughter’s use of the iPad and my old phone. She has to use them in open areas of the house, so she can’t take them into her room and close the door. This is because we heard some horror stories about kids Daughter’s age stumbling into awful content online. We also changed our wireless router configurations to use Open DNS as a web filter for our home network.

We informed her of these changes yesterday when she wanted to use the iPad to search how-to videos on YouTube Kids for a craft project she had thought up. Oh the tears.

Her objections took a surprising route, though. What started as, “Why do you have to watch everything I do?” became “Why can’t I be into things without you guys knowing about it?” which became “Why do you guys embarrass me by telling people about the things I like?”

So it’s only partly a tech issue. It’s also very much an individuation and privacy issue, where an eight year old wants to express an interest in things that are maybe a bit out of reach (Taylor Swift) and things that remain anchored in childhood (Shopkins) at the same time and is developing an acute self consciousness about her parents’ and her peers’ perceptions of her tastes.

It’s also not just a kid issue but also a parenting one in which Mom and Dad need to learn to respect a measure of hiddenness about Daughter’s life and not talk so openly to people she barely knows about her and her fascinations.

None of these issues were on our radar three days ago. The landscape changes quickly, so you need to keep up. That means learning new technical strategies but also spotting the things you need to get better at, the things you need to learn. I guess that process never stops.

Daughter can’t get to sleep at night these days. She’s forever getting drinks of water and finding reasons to leave her room and come into her parents’. She’s scared. There’s something under her bed or in her closet, she just knows it.

“I put the bed together,” I say. “I know there’s nothing under there. It’s not big enough.”

“Yes it is.”

“Do you want me to check?”

“No!”

The same prohibition applies to the closet. I can’t check. I can’t turn the closet light on and open the door. And so she lays awake as long as possible, doing everything she can think of to not be in her room. This is a problem with an immunity to facts.

The monster under your bed, the monster beyond your border, the monster lurking in the public restroom: it can’t be vanquished with evidence and empirical data. It lives in our gut, not in our mind. The only thing that kills it is maturation.

 

 

If you write something and put it out there today, you may be doing your future self a favor. You are guaranteeing that, two years from now, you will have a body of work to look at. That’s worth something.

If you don’t write something and put it out there today, you are guaranteeing that you won’t get a phone call from a complete stranger two years from now telling you how the thing you wrote had an impact on them and their work.

The long tail. Drip. Drip. Drip. And all the rest of it.

What are you waiting for?

The teenagers I work with don’t need the church to structure social opportunities for them. This might have been a valuable aspect of youth ministry at one time–filling kids’ calendars with welcoming and healthy gatherings with their peers–but it doesn’t seem to be anymore. Youth seem to me to have more than enough positive social commitments between classmates, teammates, band mates, choir mates, and even neighbors.

We tried this. We made a calendar of weekly summer events to get youth together. A trip to the museum. A day at the beach. Free movies in the park. Participation has been almost null. Almost.

My conclusion: gathering their peers around them is not something most teenagers need the church to be doing for them.

Facilitating meaningful mission service is. A bunch of youth eagerly give a week of their summer to that. So is exploring faith. Sunday youth group is humming. Even full court recreation is a valuable contribution to teens’ lives that churches are making; see the demand for lock-ins.

Let’s all get together doesn’t seem all that compelling without a Why.