In the past I have written a little about the youth group that my church San Pablo and my host family’s church, San Juan Evangelista, is trying to really get up and running this year. Well we’ve had a few really great nights, but the overall theme has kind of been that it’s a difficult time of year to start a new group (right now all the students are ending their school years with exam weeks and heading into summer vacation) and we’re also finding out that there are a lot of logistics to work through due to the fact that it is a youth group shared between two churches.
For our last meeting I sent out the typical Facebook message informing the teens about when and where our group would be this week and on Friday at 6:30 I waited at the church. Three teens showed up- two sisters and one other guy. In the past when just 3 or 4 have showed up we’ve played volleyball for a little while, maybe ate a snack or something then headed home early…but this night they all seemed like they really had nothing else going on and wanted to hang out. So I asked, well what do you guys do on a typical Friday night if you have nothing going on? Their response…we usually take the bus to McDonald’s. Perfect, that is what we are going to do.
So we stopped by one of their houses to get money and the four of us went to the bus stop. Being in such a casual setting they really seemed to open up. We talked about everything from the breakup the guy was currently going through, to the cute new shoes that one of the girls bought, to the idea of us girls signing up to run a half-marathon together this spring. We loaded up on ice cream, fries and double cheeseburgers….joking around about the fact that the guy freaked out every time his phone buzzed thinking it was his x-girlfriend and laughing about the fact that eating like this is how we were training for our half-marathon. It made me realize two things. One- teens are the same all over the world…it doesn’t matter if you’re from Argentina or the U.S., you’re still going to go through those hard/awkward teen years. And two- numbers do not matter for this youth group. These kids just want someone to hang out with, someone new to talk to.
These three teens normally wouldn’t have spent their Friday night together, but this group can create a space for teens to just to have a safe place to hang out- with an ‘adult’ other than their parents. This experience really challenged me to promise myself that from now on, even if 1 teen shows up, I’m just going to spend the night talking with them, getting to know them and showing them that someone wants to spend time with them for no other reason than just because.
loving outside the lines 