In February 2006, John Piper wrote a post called “Don’t Waste Your Cancer.” While I’ve never had cancer I resonated with his trying to make sense out of something which must have seemed to not make sense to him.
If God foresees molecular developments becoming cancer, he can stop it or not. If he does not, he has a purpose.
Since God has sovereignty over the molecular things in our bodies we can agree that God also has sovereignty over bigger things, like macroeconomics.
If chasing dreams is the folly of youth I want to be forever young.
I’m chasing some dreams right now. I’m unashamed about it. For too long I sat on them, taking little action in their pursuit or even allowing myself the mental capacity to dream about these dreams.
Perhaps I was convinced they weren’t worth chasing? Or perhaps I lacked the wisdom, skills, knowledge, or intestinal fortitude? Or– worse yet, perhaps I was convinced that dreams that I had wouldn’t make a difference and were therefore meaningless to pursue?
Oh yeah, Open is really cool.
It’s crazy. Life comes at you a million miles per hour sometimes. With the holidays and my trip to Africa I didn’t have a lot of mental space to get excited for Open Boston. It was one of those things where I was pumped about it in a cognitive and strategic kind of way. But it wasn’t until Friday evening that the emotions of its awesomeness really started to hit me.
Here’s Five Emotional Polaroid’s I Took at Open Boston.
Here’s 5 ideas that are outside of the norm for youth group. (Nothing wrong with traditional youth group, just sharing ideas.) My hope is that these ideas will spark you to create programs that your community actually needs as opposed to building your ministry purely on a combination of felt need & what you experienced as a teenager.
Let’s hang some meat on yesterday’s post, Making Youth Ministry More Programmatic, Again.
Before you start going through old clip art files and reprinting Run the Bases to post on the wall in your youth room, let’s get a quick rundown of things that’ll get you going the right direction. (That’s a Purpose-Driven Youth Ministry reference for readers under 30.)
I’ve been unable to shake two things about my trip with World Vision from an organizational perspective.
In a week we’ll be underway with Open Boston.
18 presenters are taking the risk with us. About 100 folks have signed up to come… we’re really hoping another 50-100 take the leap this week. (For Open Seattle we went from 60-130 in the week prior to the event.)
Together we see the value in flipping the typical youth ministry training event on its head, favoring local voices of innovation over national ones; unpublished experts over published ones; frontline learnings versus polished and tested presentations.
No one is getting paid. No one is making a career out of this. And all of the presenters will, at some point, make a transition from learner to teacher and back. (Meaning they’re coming as both learners and teachers.)
I sat my jetlagged, cold-suffering self down in front of the television on Monday. My heart swelled with civic pride as I prepared to watch Barack Obama, a man whose skin color long prevented individuals like him from having a serious shot at the nations highest office, be sworn in for his second term as President of the United States… on Martin Luther King, Jr Day.
A lot of youth workers have been asking me about Snapchat, a mobile picture sharing service that is popular amongst some segments of teenagers.
I know there are some innocent uses out there. I’ve even heard from youth ministry folks who use it to connect with their students and crowd-source ideas. But I also know of some horror stories. Stories of regret and exposure to things their eyes didn’t want to see.
I spent last week with an amazing group of youth workers as we traveled from Seattle to Zimbabwe and back. And while I knew a few of them casually beforehand– during the trip we all got to know one another much better as we were drawn together by shared experiences.