Two Letters

I have read a lot of articles lately on Pastors. Most have centered around what they think and what they wish people knew about them or how to talk to one. I can never figure out why it is that suddenly you can see a topic come out in bunches (I suspect it has to do with us all reading the same things on social media), but I think the articles are very interesting.

The main effect of the articles for me is that it got me thinking. I thought about them so much, that I decided last week to write out a letter and read it up in front of our high school group. It was not about how pastors think – I am not an expert on that one! The letter was simply about what I thought about the students, which for me is easier to say by first writing it all out.

I read the letter on Wednesday night, and I basically sweat through the whole thing. I hate reading my own writing out-loud. It always feels like not wearing any pants or something.

After several days now, I keep getting the feeling that I need to put it up on my blog, not to get an ego boost, but on the off chance that a student needs to hear the words again. I know I forget the truth about myself a lot.

So, here it is…

****

To my Catalyst family – My favorite blend of crazy.

I have to get this out before my heart explodes: I freaking love your faces.

It’s a humbling thing to lead a group like this.  You are so much stronger and deeper and passionate than people give you credit for.  You do amazing things without even realizing it most of the time.  Ordinary awesome that makes me stand a little taller when I hear about it.  Those moments when I just want to run around and brag on you.  To tell everyone, see what they did?!  I know them!

We really love you guys.

I hope you know that. This past year and a half of Wednesdays have been some of my greatest times ever. It is hard to sleep at night after a slammin Wednesday night. Yes, I did say slammin.

Whenever I think about this group, I love that I only see faces.

I don’t think of you in some abstract way, like as some place, but when I think and pray and remember you, I see your faces.

Sometimes smiling.

Sometimes yelling in a game.

Sometimes crying in a leader’s arms.

Sometimes across a table from me having some real talk.

My heart always responds to it.

I can get very locked up on details and plans and trying to do this job right, and then I will go visit a school and it all changes. You help me remember what is important.

****

Being in this Catalyst family helps me find my rhythm a lot more than I ever realized. This place, there is something here. It is like I can hear God’s rhythm in the way we talk and love each other here.

It is like when I went camping with my in laws this past summer.   The campground was covered in layers of dust. This red mountain clay dust, and it got everywhere. It was all over us by the end of a few days. You just couldn’t get it off you.

I think the love here is a lot like that. It just gets stuck on us. It stains our hearts together and I hope it never changes. Because that’s so what God is like!

It is why going to camp for a few days together last weekend meant so much.

In spite of crappy mattresses and nearly freezing parts of my body off, I wouldn’t be anywhere else even if I could. A part of my family was there, why would I go anywhere else?

That joy of sitting on logs chatting, hikes, paintball, crazy games involving tampons (don’t ask!), such bad food, and then sitting in the chapel, being honest.

I hope that Rhythm sticks with you for a long time.

I really mean that.

Because I have done all the camps. I am a bit of a junkie that way. In two weeks I will have been going to Hume Lake Camps for almost a decade straight. I have been down to the front dozens of times.

I remember in middle school going down to the front at Hume Lake, telling God that I wanted to do whatever He wanted me to do.

I remember my first high school trip to Christ In Youth like it was yesterday.

I went down to the front of the line, hands raised and ugly crying. I was distraught about my life and told God, I will go wherever. I will do whatever. God just don’t let me go.

I remember one night at CIY when a friend named Ashley and my sister went down to the front. I saw them and ran down, just ugly crying all over again with them. It’s kind of a theme with me.

There were so many of us down there!

But now, well over a dozen years later, I am looking around at my life and I am like, where is everybody? Where is everyone that said,

GOD, I WILL GO ANYWHERE!

I WILL DO ANYTHING!

HERE I AM JESUS, I LOVE YOU!

I think about that group, that 40 of us, and it’s only Ashley and me and my sister, maybe a few others left. Maybe 5 of us still serving God.

Even my youth pastor that led us to the camp walked out of my life after I had spent a summer in Romania, never explaining his sins to me. He was just gone. He jokes now about how he can’t believe he was ever a youth pastor.

****

So many people ask us as youth leaders, “So, How many students come now on a Wednesday?”

And I’ve got to be honest – I don’t care.

I really don’t care how many people are in the room. We can slam the place to the walls with students and totally fail at the following Jesus thing. The point of youth group is not numbers or fun, it’s family. It’s about finding a place to belong, having the space to find that rhythm for each of our lives. That purpose which God has for each of us.

I hope that comes across.

****

Sheri and I joke a lot about how our goal is not to be great parents, but be parents that have to pay for as little therapy as possible for our kids. It’s a pretty big goal. I mean, I am a strange dad!

I hope for our parts that we get to play in your life, we as youth leaders get to do the same. That we play the part of people modeling God’s love with a passion that only gets bigger and louder. That we point you to God.

I want so badly for you to be after Jesus 10 years from now. That is success to me.

Not because that might be the churchy thing to do.

Not because it’s kind of like what we are supposed to do.

Not because it sounds good.

But because I care about you.

And I care more about where you are as a person than if you are in a crowd that can fill up my ego.

****

About a year ago, in a bathroom at Mount Hermon Camp, I wrote out a letter.

I was so scared of all this – the job, the students, the responsibility.

I was scared I could not do it.

I was so nervous that I would screw up this great thing and ruin it all.

I had run out of all my fun ideas and stuff to say.

My family felt like it was ripping apart.

It was so hard.

So I sat down in tears in a bathroom at last year’s winter camp and penned out a letter to the church council saying that I was planning on resigning. I was positive that they had been misguided in giving me the job, and that I had been confused about a vision God had given me. I was not the guy.

I had it with me for a month, never submitting it to anyone for one reason or another. Finally, a month later, I trashed it.

I was slowly realizing that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to do this job. I would never be smart or cool or funny enough to do this, because none of it was about any of that.

God had to bring me to the breaking point, to the point I realized the depth of my incapacity, so that He could show me reality – that I don’t got this.

It took having a bunch of those end of the bed moments – those times when you collapse in a heap against the end of the bed, utterly distraught at how the harder you try, the more you simply spread the mess around – to finally start showing me that without God, there is nothing. The farther I got from God, the more it all fell apart.

You just can’t do it without God.

My wife, Sheri, makes a lot of scarves and beanies. When she is really going strong, there is this clack-clack rhythm to it all. When it is going right, there is a definite rhythm that it goes to and the stitches fall in line, and beautiful things are created.

It seems to be that sometimes, God allows things to happen in our lives to remind us that in it all, He has got us. Often, embracing God in the midst of pain is the way God shows us that we are trying to make something we were never intended to. We are trying to create our own pattern and what really needs to happen is for God to take it all apart. To let God unravel it all and start over.

In each unraveling, I see so many things that went wrong.  Misplaced stitches, patterns to nowhere and knots, so many knots.  As God pulls it all apart, the true patterns begin to emerge.

I start to become more me. The real me. And you will become more you.

I don’t say any of this lightly.

Some of us have incredible hurts.

Those things that slice straight through and it feels like this burden you have is going to drown you.  That you will never recover and you will never understand why THAT happened to you.  Where you feel the drama/ family situation/ relationship/ whatever it is, that it will be like a giant rock that just utterly crushes you.
Some of you, I hear it in your voices and the looks in your eyes, you simply feel that you are trapped.  You feel so alone that you wanted to stay at that camp last weekend forever because going back was so much harder.

Some of you are good now, things are working out, but you get nervous that later on God is going to ask you to walk a hard path…and you probably will. And in those moments it will suck, and you will want to quit. And you might.

Some of you hear all this and think it is for someone else. That you don’t need this. You are strong and can do it on your own.

You might be able to for a while, but my prayer is that you take a hard look at life. You really start looking at, and investigating, how you are running things. Is that working? Or are you slowly running out of Joy?

I hope you find what I know to the depth of me to be true. I hope you discover the same thing that anchors me in the midst of my weekly doubting sessions and trials.

And it is this: there is only one name that saves this train wreck of me, and that is the name of Jesus.

There is no other name I trust in. No other name that makes me get those feels.
It is Jesus. That is it. And I hope you start to trust in him, maybe even right now.

Maybe you sit and hear all this and it is like, Okay, Joel is reading a whole bunch tonight. Great. I have so much I need to get done…

Or you might be saying, Okay, I don’t feel like I ever hear from God anymore. I try to talk to Him, but can’t hear Him much…

Something crazy I learned the other day, and thought about all last weekend at Camp, was this:

The book of Esther is entirely about God, yet in that book of the Bible, God is not mentioned one single time. Not once. But it is all about him. All about How He brings hope in a completely hopeless situation.

A point about that could be simply this – just because you are going through a time when you can’t seem to hear him, or you feel like God doesn’t say anything to you like He does to others, does not mean for you to give up. Don’t give up.

Sometimes God does not answer right away because He has something really big to tell you, but needs you to be hungry for it. He wants to show you the Rhythm He has for you, but not until you are ready to really start dancing. Don’t give up. Keep focusing on God.

If you get nothing from this, I hope you know that God loves you.  I love you.  We as youth leaders sacrifice so much because we love you. Our families give up so much because we all believe in the significance of your life. That you matter.

I have no idea how to end this, I just know that sometimes in life you have to say what you really think.

You have to have the courage to put words to thoughts because you might not get a second chance. And so I tried my best to do that with you tonight.

I love you.

I am so proud of you.

Thank you for being a part of this family.

-Joel