unConnected The reality is that for every person who feels connected to a church or to "people like them" there are 10 who aren’t connected. This isn’t the end of the world, but it isn’t all that great either.
If you’re a student and you’r unConnected than you are a floater. You’ve got plenty of acquantances but are looking for some friends who will really love you for who you are. You’d be cautious about calling yourself lonely because that makes it seem like you are a loser or something. You aren’t a loser, you just are unConnected. The answer is keep trying to make the connection!
Connect! There is an "aha" moment when someone finally connects with someone they click with. It happens and you aren’t sure how or why… you just know that you feel a sense of relief and you instantly feel like you’ve belonged for a long time.
For youth workers, this happens on YMX every day. It is exciting because someone realizes that they aren’t alone in their struggles. They find out that geographically they aren’t even that far from one another! Suddenly it dawns on them that while they feel anonymous and ambigious in the universe of youth ministry they can connect.
Connecting The next step is when you realize that the first connection may have been an accident, but you can do something about connecting some more.
For a LF student, this isn’t all that easy! Middle school students feel very stuck in their groupings. They tend to fear that if they go outside of their group, even if they made a new link to someone and connected, if they go outside of their group too much they fear that they will be rejected by this. It’s not any worse for a guy as it is for a girl. Here’s the crazy reality though… you can connect your group by being the link!
Connected Almost every day I’ll talk to someone and say "I know a guy in New York that does _________." Then I’ll see their head turn sideways and you can see them think, "How does a youth dude in tiny Romeo, Michigan know another youth pastor in another state?" It’s because I am connected to a group that doesn’t have geographical boundaries.
Every group has boundaries. (Study Group Dynamics and your head will spin!) When you have good friends in high school there is a paralizing reality during your senior year when you realize that this group you’ve been connected to forever is falling apart due to geography. One of you is going to State. Another is headed to Alma. Another is going to stay at Macomb. But being and getting connected is not limited to geography. For me, YMX and it’s predecessors where fantastic at helping me get connected with people who were wired like me. Is it weird that most of these "friends" have never met in the flesh? Sure it is. And an awkward thing is that not every time you meet up with a YMX friend does it turn out the way you want… (Meeting up with Todd and Kim has been the coolest thing in YMX so far!) but it’s better than being unConnected. [About YMXes vision]
At the end of the day you are reading this in one of these chairs. Are you unConnected, connected, connecting, or connected? Of course, most of us sit in all of those chairs at the same time… but as I reflect on different areas of my life, I think about those levels of connection.
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