Head Above Water

Teen 1: “Before I get in the car and get mad at you, you owe me $5.”

Caleb: “No I don’t, and you can just stay here.”

I am getting better at dealing with a comical level of ridiculousness.

Teen 2: “Take me with you to Minneapolis.”

Caleb: “You have already missed forty days of school this year.”

It’s getting easier to say “no.”

Teen 3: “I am never coming back to church again because I didn’t see my girlfriend when I came to Man Time.”

Caleb: “Okay, that is your decision.”

He changed his mind later. Church is not about “snacks”; Jesus is the Bread of Life, real food for eternity. And that’s real easy to say.

These are fun and true interactions from the past week, but it’s harder to find my bearing when a fourteen-year-old kid gets kicked out of his own house or when a college student is having crisis-level anxiety. Sometimes it feels suffocating.

I drove up to speak near Minneapolis and in that time I stepped back enough to realize some of the draining feelings that plague me and ministry workers like me. There is this underlying perception that people are mad at you, that you are never enough, and that just about anything else could be easier… And all those things are probably true. I am never enough and have never enough time, strength, approval, or faith for the people around me.

“I don’t want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit. I want people to look at my life and know that I couldn’t be doing this by my own power.” 

- Francis Chan, Forgotten God

I guess I should be encouraged that my life is trending in a direction that has me feeding on Jesus and His Spirit alone and thereby putting the spotlight on Jesus and His Spirit alone. There’s a prayer to be had because of that. In order to survive I need to be having better interactions with God than the teens are having with me.