One of the things that people who work with youth in churches care a lot about is that those youth have close relationships with each other. We call it bonding.

I wonder if we don’t actually mean something else though. I wonder if bonding is not so much a goal of our ministry with young people as it is a byproduct. I wonder if the healthy thriving community of Christian disciples that we are trying to form is not held together more by common values and aims than it is by close personal bonds.

That’s all I have for today. I slept through both my alarms.

1. Social media use among teens has risen dramatically since 2012.
2. Only a very few teens say that using social media has a negative effect on how they feel about themselves; many more say it has a positive effect.
3. Social media has a heightened role–both positive and negative–in the lives of more vulnerable teens.
4. Teens’ preference for face-to-face communication with friends has declined substantially, and their perception of social media’s interference with personal interactions has increased.
5. Many teens think tech companies manipulate users to spend more time on their devices and say that digital distractions interfere with homework, personal relationships, and sleep.
6. Teens have a decidedly mixed record when it comes to self-regulating device use.
7. There has been an uptick in teens’ exposure to racist, sexist, and homophobic content on social media, ranging from an increase of 8 to 12 percentage points.
8. Some teens have been cyberbullied, including about one in 10 who say their cyberbullying was at least “somewhat” serious.
9. Social media is an important avenue of creative expression for many kids.

Check out the full report here.

The interaction of key finding numbers five and six are where it’s at for me. Most of the teens I work with are not blind to the forces driving their device use, and many express a sense of disappointment that they aren’t better about using them less. But they don’t know how. Seriously, if I’d had a smartphone at 15 I would have been lost; 42 ain’t exactly killing it.

This research feels important for youth ministry.

You’ve been saying for as long as I can remember that “tolerance” is the spirit of the age, the dominant cultural value that your flock must resist in the name of Biblical authority. But you’re not paying close enough attention. You’re misreading virtuous acceptance and welcome as tolerance of that which is vile and using that critique as a shield to hide behind. Worse, you still appear uninterested in the people doing the tolerating or being tolerated. That makes you look lazy.

At the same time, you are failing to notice a rising intolerance among those you experience as only “nonbelievers.” They are less tolerant of you for sure, a posture you have not missed and have not failed to decry as a threatening of your religious liberty. But you’re missing the bigger picture. Religiously motivated exclusion is increasingly rejected today as part of a larger cultural complex tied together with racist and sexist strings. Yet you remain unwilling to examine that complex and your part in it.

If “intolerance” is still your go-to homiletical punching bag in 2018, you need to up your game.

Your work feels routine most days, or if not routine, then at least manageable–to you. You know where the invoice slips are and that September is the month to book a venue for the spring retreat and who to send the worship bulletin to and by when. Once you’ve been at this awhile you’ve got the major blocks of your work in hand and it all flows like normal.

That’s the time to try to explain it to someone new.

The simple exercise of talking through the annual events calendar, for example, and describing why each event is on there, the major tasks required by each one, ways you changed events last year, and so on, is sufficient to remind you just how much is involved in all of this. You’re not conscious of it anymore, but the work you’re doing is complex and you have mastered major parts of it.

Good work.

Your first day is one thing. Someone else’s first day is another entirely.

On your first day, you only have to worry about the impression made by one person: you. On someone else’s first day, you have to worry about the impression made by everyone.

On your first day, you experience everything for the first time and are in control of your reaction. You manage someone else’s first experience of everything on thier first day and have zero control over how they react.

You present yourself as a competent professional who is worth the investment on your fist day. But you must present an entire organization on someone else’s first day so that they feel, right away, that working with you is worth their investment.

Someone else’s first day feels like a test of whether the work you’re doing is exciting to someone new. The rule surely applies here too: begin as you intend to continue.

The first day of school is not unlike every other day after. The building is in the same place and classes start at the same time. It is merely the first in a nine month stretch of just another days.

And yet the supplies are pristine from non-use and glimmering with potential. The outfits are new. Relationships have rested and are primed to be resumed or reset. The first day of school bulges with promise at the same time as it primes to disappoint.

For the first day of school, then: take the opportunity to start of a good foot and to make a good impression, but also begin as you intend to continue.

We work everyday.

If you’re not at your office or working on some project, you’re packing your kid’s lunch or listening to your friend’s story of work stress.

There is leisure in the midst of it, but we are never completely free of work. Physical work, emotional work, intellectual work: it’s all work.

So it’s not a choice between working and not working. Rather, it’s a choice between working with purpose and intention or working with frustration.

Yes, there are forces and factors that compound fatigue and frustration in people’s work, both paid and non-paid. Those of us who get to make lots of choices about how and where and when we work are the lucky ones. Yet the choice will always be there in whatever work we are required to do: do it well or do it just to do it.

Some days that choice is easier than others.

Happy Labor Day.

I’m not afraid that my contribution will be controversial or disruptive, that people will not know what to do with it or disagree with it. I’m afraid they won’t want to do anything with it. I’m afraid it will be boring. I’m afraid people have already heard it, and better, from speakers with flashier slides and more compelling anecdotes. I’m not afraid they’ll throw fruit and boo. I’m afraid they’ll yawn.

We know this is garbage, right? We know that the best truths bear retelling and that people are not yearning for visuals and witticisms. We know that. Still, we’re afraid our contribution is nothing special.

The best way to overcome the fear? Say yes. Commit to a deadline. Set a timer.

Time’s up. Time to give what you’ve got.

Please.

You worked for hours on it. You saved your changes. You backed up to the cloud. You got it done.

Then the cloud failed or the changes didn’t save. It’s gone. You lost it. You have nothing.

Or don’t you? The thinking and rehearsing and writing still happened. You can recall it, can’t you?

I’m just saying you haven’t completely lost it.

When she moved to Denver, my sister in law and I had some things to talk about for the first time in the roughly 10 years I’d been seeing her sister. I’m from Denver.

It helped that she took an interest in the Rockies.

Visiting my parents now also included walks around 16th Street with her, stops at Diedrich Coffee, and evenings tasting Denver’s newest microbrews in her Capital Hill apartment. I was full of envy; she lived the life I yearned for as a suburban adolescent: urban, single, cool.

Her marriage changed those visits a little. She and her wife got a house with a garden, so instead of walking downtown we sat around the firepit in the backyard. We still drank microbrews though. We started bringing a baby on those visits.

That season ended before I could really appreciate it when she abruptly moved to France by herself. She visited us in Los Angeles while she was securing her visa, and we only saw her one more time after that, when we visited for three days in 2015. Another city apartment. A different wife. It didn’t feel like it fit.

My sister in law and I had leaving Denver in common now, but that felt more like a divide than a bond.