Saturday Stories

Last week I experienced one of those events in life that makes everything real.  One of those happenings that wake you up, that splash cold water on your face, and makes you sober.

I work for a church in Texas as their stage manager.  It’s a great job and I love what I do and where I work but my position requires me to stay on target and make sure the schedule is running in order, there isn’t much time with my job to simply sit and experience things, to experience the service and the people.  I am always running around on Sunday mornings trying to make sure everyone knows what is going on and that there are no issues.  The job of a stage manager is not to relax and enjoy the service, the job of a stage manager is to run and worry about the details.

In the church I also volunteer with the youth ministry where I do a variety of things one of which is teaching a spiritual growth class and preparing for an upcoming missions trip to Los Angels.  It is a stark contrast between the two positions; in my job it’s more about schedule and operations and in my volunteering it is more about people and relationship.

Last Saturday we had a training session for the youth who are going on the missions trip to L.A.  The youth pastor did something brilliant, something I never would have thought of, he handed out a piece of paper and a pen and gave everyone some time to write down their story.  The goal was for each person to become comfortable and familiar enough with his or her personal story so they would be relatable to those we would be ministering to in Los Angels.

As everyone wrote out their stories I walked around and looked over the shoulder of some of the youth who were writing away, one student had a diagram he’d drawn on his page.  On one said of the line he’d written “Before Christ” and on the other side he’d written “After Christ” and he’d listed some things under each category.  I laughed a bit and thought to myself, “how could a teenager have that much to write about before Christ?”

After everyone finished writing their story the youth pastor split the whole group into smaller groups and sent the young men with myself and another guy in the leadership of the youth department, Jeremiah.

We took the group of six young men and had them pair off to role-play how to approach a stranger on the street and start a conversation.  It was a bit awkward for everyone and after a few failed attempts I asked the group to come back together. 

Instead of trying the role-playing approach we decided to each take a turn sharing our personal story we’d just written down.  Everyone got two minutes to talk and to take us through their personal stories.  I started with mine and we went around the circle.  I didn’t hold any of the details back from my story I just told the group my experiences of going from drinking and smoking cigarettes to smoking pot and sleeping with girlfriends and I finished my time talking about how I got back into a church and met with my Pastor and how he helped me turn my life around.

As the next young man spoke he talked about abusive parents and divorce and rape and drugs and being placed in foster care and then being adopted and brought to church, the very church we were standing in.  The next young man spoke of similar scenarios and then the next and the next and the next and so on until we’d completed the circle.  Every single one had stories of the most horrible things involving situations and relationships that had changed their lives.

“My parents got divorced two years ago and I started getting angry and getting in fights in school.  I mean, how could two people who love each other just split up like that and wreck their home and their family?”  One young man said as he choked back tears.

“My dad killed himself when I was just a kid, I don’t think he meant to do it, he was going through a lot of hard stuff at the time.  I got really depressed and they sent me to a shrink and gave me some pills but none of it helped.”  Another young man shared.

At the end of each story, they spoke of someone in their lives who’d brought them to our church, Destiny World Outreach, and how they got connected and their lives haven’t been the same since.

It was truly heartbreaking for me to hear these stories, to hear that children and teenagers have gone through such horrible things.  In that moment I realized that life and working for a church isn’t about the schedule or the agenda, it’s not about the order of service or the time clock or even the amount of people in the service, it’s about the lives that are changed, it’s about providing a place of refuge and healing and strength for the people who are broken and hurting and who have nowhere else to go.

When you are conditioned to strictly follow a schedule you rarely just sit back and relax.  Over the last year I have transitioned from someone who makes every decision based on emotion to someone who makes every decision based on logic and reason.  When I asked everyone to share their stories I wasn’t attempting to make an emotional decision, I was making a logical decision without expecting to have the experience I had.  That’s the thing with our routines, God will typically find a way to interrupt our schedules and awaken us to His goodness and grace all over again.  That is what happened to me on that Saturday.