Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God...

I recently sent a brief email to one of our teens at church. She is an adopted, alternative, punk freshman, who Natalie and I just love to death. She doesn't speak up much in class; she likes to listen to everyone else's thoughts. But, every time I facilitate a discussion or just sit in the class with them, I can tell that her wheels are turning. She is a thinker by nature, even if some people don't think so. In my email, I asked her to "type out some of your thoughts on God for me. Nothing is off limits here. Would you be interested?" This is what she sent back to me (replete with the original typos and all).

"Thoughts on God. God is a very intreguing being. It amazes me how he is forever and was never born and will never die and how he created such a beautiful world and how he is so quiet yet he speaks so loud and how he touches peoples lives in such amazing ways. It is amazing how he can be so loved and so hated at the same time and it will never cease to amaze me how people cant believe in him. I mean they cant be that blind, even if I had never known anything about God I would still have to think there was something much greater than I am to create the world with all its detail and whatnot.”

I can’t help but think that we can and should look hopefully into the future. We have teens and even younger children thinking about God in profound ways from an early age. They are asking difficult, engaging questions, struggling to understand God and the relevance of the life of discipleship more fully. They want to live out their faith in the midst of believing communities and, yet, not find themselves cloistered off away from and useless to the rest of the world. They have the ability to really engage pop culture as a means to help narrate the Christian story to a broken world. Yet, they need guidance; they need direction; they need people to walk alongside them in the journey of faith and encourage them to look and search beyond our mundane bickering and tribalism. And we need them. We need them to serve as our teachers, as our missionaries, and as our mentors. That is one of the beauties of the Christian faith. It calls us to be one body and to challenge and learn from each as we take the journey of faith through.