December is upon us and there is not much on the Youth Ministry calendar. We do this on purpose every year. Families get pretty busy celebrating Christmas, attending parties, getting together with family, and helping others in need. We don’t want to compete with all this goodness. If you are looking for something to do, please check the church website or program. There are a lot of opportunities to serve and be part of other festive activities. As always, we will continue to meet every Sunday for our youth ministry program.

Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.

I’ve gotten some better perspective on this verse lately. My friends and I used to quote this all the time when we were in a band together. It was a sort of ‘don’t let the tough stuff get you down’ type verse. Somewhere along the way I was suppose to find joy it what was going on in my life at the time.

Now when I see this verse and think about the hard stuff, I’m not focusing on the idea of being joyful, but recognizing that I am going through something that defines who I am as a person. So many times we want avoid the tough stuff. We also don’t wan to see others have to deal with hard things. The reality is we need to. The hard things mold us and shape us into the people we are today. They prepare us for future tough times so we can ride them out. They develop a faith and trust in God.

Bad stuff and the ickiness of the world is all around. It is unavoidable. We can try to control everything, but that never really works. It is just a false sense of security. I am going to choose to have faith in God and trust him. In my experience, he has a lot of things under control.

How are you at communicating with others?

Peace!

Well, we gathered some High School students together and drove around northern Kentucky this past Saturday night for a scavenger hunt. James compiled a list of interesting items for us to hunt down and take pictures of. Along the way Smith and Bob sent out clues as to where they might be to give out bonus points for the teams that could find them. In the end, the group of girls with Charity won. Congratulations!

The big bummer for the night was getting rained on when we arrived for our bonfire to close out the night. Smith tried his best to maintain a fire, but the rain prevailed and everyone ended up inside. We still had plenty of snacks, drinks, and cool stories to share about the night’s adventure.

John 11:35 (NLT)

This is the shortest verse in the Bible. You really have to look at the surrounding verses to get what is going on with Jesus here.

Today my thoughts took me to the different reasons why people cry. People can cry because of pain, sadness, grief, joy, hurt feelings, and the list can go on. After thinking about those reasons for a while I wondered if Jesus ever cries for me. And I think he does. He probably cries over me for all sorts of reasons. I’m sure he has cried tears of joy over parts of my life. I’ll bet he has cried because I have hurt him in some way by my actions. I think he has cried with me over some pain in my life as well. I am glad he cares for us that deeply that he shares in all areas of our lives’.

I think it is a common question many Youth Pastors ask. Am I weird, and that is a cool thing? Or am I too weird, and no one ever wants to hang out with. I think I like to flirt with that edge of too weird. I think many of the High School students think I’m weird enough, and so I am deemed worthy enough to hang out with, but I also love to push that boundary. Today would have been on of those “too weird” days.

I shared how my time with God has been going as of late. To emphasize some items I used a few pictures to drive home some of my thoughts. I think I pushed the limit to what they really wanted to see. Here is just one example:

Doesn’t this picture say that I am missing a connection with some students?

Matthew 22:15-17

Here we have the basic principles for dealing with someone that offends you or who you have a beef with. The last part is what really gets me. Treating someone as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector means loving them, not hating them. Man, it is hard to love people that really tick you off isn’t it?

Matthew 18:15-17 has a great process to live by when dealing with the people that offend you. Probably the best thing we can do is to love those difficult people. Romans 12:17-21 goes right against our gut instinct to repay evil for evil by showing our enemies (difficult people) love. We talked about some really good stuff in the High School ministry.

I also gave some practical stuff for students to do when dealing with those difficult individuals. You can check them out in this blog post from Think Simple Now.

~Dealing with Difficult People~

Mark 14:51-52 (NLT)

I thought I might share an incident of streaking in the Bible. I can’t tell you how many funny things are in the Bible when you really look for them. Not everyone approves of streaking, but sometimes you have no choice.