Youth: Find Wonderful...

This is a post I've been trying to write for a long time. For some reason, the words just wouldn't come. BUT when I was asked to give a testimony at a LifeTeen Youth Ministry training retreat this weekend, this was the first thing that came to my mind and the words just came. This is a slightly adapted version of my personal testimony.

This is why I love youth ministry.

Anybody who knows me for longer than 15.8 seconds knows I’m a very passionate person. I’m also very cynical, very strange and I love people (even if most of the time I pretend I really don’t).

I also consider myself to have a great sense of wonder – but this hasn’t always been the case.

Now, months ago, Myer was running a campaign – ‘Find Wonderful.’ You can watch it here. For our American friends, ‘Myer’ is a department store probably equivalent to Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s. If you watch the ad, it speaks of the sense of wonder you experience as a child and how one day, ‘we all got serious in a great great blah of ‘adequate.’’ The ad then goes on to ask ‘why, when there’s so much to feel wonderful about?’

Now, the first time I saw the campaign I started to reflect, and then being me, got distracted with all the pretty Parisian dresses and impossibly high heels. BUT, the second time I saw the campaign, I thought about it. Where did the world’s sense of wonder go? When did life get ordinary?

Kids – teens – have a sense of wonder. Being a part of iSeek helped me become both a witness to and a part of that wonder. There is nothing more beautiful than watching them fall in love with the drama of love that is Christ. There is nothing more rewarding than being a part – however small – of their realisation that Jesus is not just ‘almighty God’ – all knowing, all powerful, ever present: distant – but that He is a person, who out of love for them, came to earth, suffered and died – and even more than that, imprisons Himself in the tabernacle day and night waiting for them. Even more than THAT even, He would do it all again for them ALONE. Once someone realises that Jesus needs to first an foremost be an encounter, there is no turning back – they’re ruined.

I think that’s the thing I love most about youth ministry. I call them ‘Jesus baby moments.’ AT LEAST every once in a while, a teen will walk up to me and show me why it’s all worth it.

Just a couple weeks ago, one of our girls walked up to me just to chat. While we were talking, she told me she couldn’t wait to leave school and that she would join the first religious order that would accept her as a sixteen year old. She then went on to criticise teens her age for not understanding where their priorities should lie – ‘like, I don’t understand why a fourteen year old needs a boyfriend – they’re not gonna get married anytime soon, BUT I’m really happy that a little while ago one of my friends told me he and his girlfriend had spoken and decided to choose love over lust.’ I guarantee they didn’t learn that from MTV.

Another time, right after same sex marriage passed in the U.S. Supreme Court and the rainbow profile pictures as well as ‘love won’ statuses became popular, one teen posted on Facebook ‘love truly won when Christ spread His arms out in the ultimate sign of love for you and I; when He died.’ Another posted it was ‘upsetting how the world is fed these lies’ only to prompt a response from another iSeek teen: ‘you know what’s crazy about Christianity, people are always jumping over what we are ‘against,’ instead of what we’re about: unconditional love.’

When teens refer to the Eucharist as ‘Jesus’ or ‘Heaven on earth,’ or speak about us as the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’ – yes, that actually happened – it never fails to make my heart dance. When I watch teens in adoration or observe them afterwards, I know we are doing something worthwhile.

That’s why I love youth ministry. It helps us never lose the sense of wonder that made us fall madly in love with Christ and His Church in the first place. Pope Pius XI used to love mountain climbing, and often used it as an analogy of how our relationships get us to Heaven. We and the teens help each other up, sometimes looking below at what we have overcome, but always motivated by what is above: the deepest, most wonderful desires of our hearts. What eye has not seen and ear has not heard, a beauty we can never imagine.

Taking Christ's call to be 'childlike' PERHAPS a little too 

seriously - but, hey, I'll bet you don't have this much fun!