Wake-Up Call

I'm not crazy about my alarm clock, because it does it's job. I love mornings, but I hate being woken up. I don't like wake up calls.

I got a wake-up call to see the hurting world around me at a student government camp this summer. It was going to be a great week! I was going to spend a week with people who were, as my friend and roommate put it, "a bunch of nerds who are more nerdy than we are!" The camp was everything I'd hoped it would be. The speakers were great, it was an awesome hands-on experience, I got to argue three different bills on the House Floor! So why, when my Mom saw me on friday, did I say, "I just want to go home!" Why could I not wait to get out of there? Because I'd seen something I hadn't wanted to see. It's funny, I had been praying for over a year, "God, please show me the hurting world around me! Please, let me be your hands and feet!" I finally got it, and I just wanted to get away from it. Because the broken world was right in front of me, right next to me. It had grown up with me, and now it was bleeding and my old tendency to run away at the sight of blood was coming out. The hurting world had been right in front of me for so long, but this time, I actually saw it!
It was right there, in the life of someone close to me. It had been awhile since we'd seen each other, and she told me she really wanted to talk to me. She had been going from one bad relationship to the next looking for someone who could fill the void in her life. She questioned whether her existence had any real meaning, had turned away from what she had grown up believing, and now turned to pain as a means of escaping all the stress and frustration she carried. She had promised herself she wouldn't cut while she was at camp, so all week, she would sit there digging her fingernail into her arm as hard as she could. The bleeding world was right next to me in the friend who always knew some funny quote she could email or text me.
It was right there, in the guy I met when he sat down next to me at the piano and added an impromptu duet to the Beethoven piece I was playing. The duet came to an end when we laughingly decided that neither of us knew how to share the keyboard. We each went our separate ways, and that was about the full extent of our interaction that week. I found out later that at sixteen he was an alcoholic.

Why am I posting about this a month after the fact? Last night at my little brother's birthday party, my Grandpa mentioned that government camp. He'd heard about it at his church and knew it was something I'd be interested in, so he wanted to know if I had gone to it. "It takes a certain type of kid to want to go to that sort of thing, but we need people like that!"

Yes, it does take a certain type of kid to want to spend a week of their summer researching and debating bills that are about to be, or recently have been, before their state legislature. And we do need people like that! But as I've found myself in that kind of group on a fairly regular basis, I've noticed something. There is an assumption that the kids who do speech or debate, or who go to government camps, or who help out with children's ministries, or any number of things that takes a certain amount of drive and a willingness to not be considered "cool" by everyone, are just fine and above the struggles that other people their age deal with.

Because, after all, the "good kids" don't struggle with self-destructive tendencies. They don't leave their faith, or question if their lives have any value or meaning. That's what the ones outside the safe bubble that we've grown up in deal with. Right?

Tell that to the two people at camp I mentioned above. Tell that to my friend who was hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Tell that to the young man who recently informed his parents that he doesn't know if he believes in God anymore.

I'm not writing this to make you depressed. I'm asking you to do something. For years I grew up being told to let God use you right where you are. I'd like to introduce you to a mission field that sometimes gets forgotten. The people around you. Just because someone has grown up in the Christian community, doesn't make them safe from Satan's attacks. We are targets. And we are just as much in need of God's mercy, grace, forgiveness, and truth as anyone else. Reach out to the people around you. They might not be as ok as they seem.