Leading the Youth.. It's a Difficult Calling

As I said in my post The Curtin Family *Under Construction*, Patrick and I are the youth leaders at our church. I occasionally teach the young kids (kindergarten and younger) when their normal teacher is out. If I'm not doing that I'm in the class with Patrick teaching the older kids, ages ranging from 11-18. We have a bit of a small (older) youth, with only 6 regulars and 2 that come a few times a month now. But then again, we are a small community church. On our big days we have around 75 in the congregation.

We normally do plays for Christmas and Easter, and we've done a few things around Thanksgiving. Since the kids are older and they've done the nativity scene pretty much their whole life, the past couple years we've tried to branch out and do different dramas, but still have the true meaning of Christmas in it. This past Christmas the kids came up with the play completely, from what it was about, all the way to the names of the characters. It was about a man with a family who was getting caught up with the everyday life of the 21st century that we're all too familiar with. He was starting to worry too much about the material things and not enough about what really matters in life, God and family. His boss even gave him a promotion, but with more money came longer hours. He was even going to have work through Christmas. One day, he met a homeless man who made him rethink about what's really important in life. When his boss walks in his office, the man is nowhere to be found. So the boss looks at the work he has on his desk and it's a big "To Do" list and where all the old business man worried about money things were listed, they were marked out and replaced with things a man worried about his relationship with God and his family. While the boss is looking at that the homeless man walks in and they start talking about the man and how he made "the right choice." Then the best part of the play, the homeless man and boss reveal their true identity, the boss is God who was tempting the man with money and greed to see if he would make the right choice and the homeless man was a Christmas angel who was just there to help push the man in the right direction.

I was so proud of my kids when we did the play. They really know how to work towards something they really want, and they wanted this play to be awesome.

Over the past year or so they've really become a family. Use to, they would just kind of break off with their own friends and we'd have 2 or 3 different groups talking. But now, they love to come together as one. Sometimes, we can't even get class started because they're all having such a good time hanging out.

We truly love teaching them, but sometimes we're afraid we don't know what they want to learn about. I mean heck, we're still learning about the bible ourselves. Patrick and I really have to look towards God for help and guiding. Without him we wouldn't be able to do it. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed and afraid that we won't get the message across, but those kids always have faith in us that we're going to have the knowledge we need to teach them. And I think that's what keeps us going. I'm truly blessed that the kids continue to want us to teach them.

 

Unfortunately this is like the only picture I have of the whole youth, it's old and a bit blurry. But this was back in 2011 after we did a special Thanksgiving play and dedicated it to the people in our congregation that had or was battling some type of cancer. This is every kid in our youth with two of the younger girls I sometimes teach.