C'mon Baby Light My Fire ...

I've learned that sometimes as a youth director you just gotta maintain. Not every lesson is gonna be "the one". I can put everything I've got into a message that I think is amazing and it'll be off the rails and falling apart within a minute or two. Then there are those that you sort of throw together from the parking lot to the youth room and for some reason they work. But then there's this other category that I can't quite label but I just know that when they happen they light my fire again and remind me why I love being a youth director. They are moments that are brought to the surface by so many things that you can ONLY attribute it to God. I had one on Sunday.

Our Sr. High Sunday school lesson was built around the story of the good Samaritan. We re-enacted the story with deplorable acting and a few laughs about our "modern" interpretation of Jesus' parable. Jesus told this parable to answer the question "Who is my neighbor?" But then we started talking about grace and grace can be tough to wrap your head around, much less try to explain. We scribbled a few things on the board; grace is a gift from God, it can't be earned, it can't be taken away, God gives it to us through the Holy Spirit. But then we interjected faith into the equation. What is faith as it relates back to grace? And it's not because I'm particularly inspiring or that the lesson was incredibly well-presented, it was because a light bulb went off in one of my kids (Eli) and he understood God's grace. Eli said, and you could tell he was saying it exactly as it was coming together in his brain, "Grace is a gift from God. Faith is us spending our whole life trying to write the thank-you note to God." And we all just sort of sat there, trying to take in what Eli had said.

It was one of those moments. One of those moments that reminds me why I love youth ministry . . . so my kids can teach me about God's grace.


Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace; God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
- Ephesians 2:7 (The Message)