Give Up or Adapt?

What a crazy time to be in right now! When thinking about what to write, it’s hard to think of anything other than this lock down we are in. I sit here and think…alone in my room because I can’t go out anywhere. There were times I didn’t want to go out of my house to do ministry, so I’d find an excuse or I’d be upset about having to go do it. Now I want nothing more than to hang out with my students. It’s for sure a hard time for all of us. We have been thrust into sudden changes and sudden changes are almost never fun. So, we can either give up and sit in front of the tv and snack away our time, or we can adapt and change and overcome.

I have been thinking about if anything like this happened in the bible for us to learn from for our current situation. I think of Paul when he was in prison. He was trapped in a place that he couldn’t get out of for a long time….and this dude wrote most of the new testament during that time. What can we learn from him? Should we start writing letters to all our students. Some students get letters like Philippians: Phil 1:3 “I thank God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with Joy.” And then some students get letters like Galatians 1:6 “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.” You know what I mean, and you know which students should get which letter. This is of course a joke, but it does bring up an interesting point. This can be a very frustrating time as youth leaders. I’m sure some of you have had students who are willing and active to participate in the things you are doing, and then there are some students who have completely fallen off the map.

It makes me think of 1 Corinthians 9:22 where Paul says “To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people that by all means I might save some.” This is a major lesson that we can learn during this time. What do we need to become to reach our students? What do they need from us at this time? For me personally it has become turning into an Instagram influencer. Having a tight schedule of content being released. Making and posting memes for them to have good content. I figured they were going be on their phones a lot, so we need to be posting where they are. To the meme page followers, I became a meme page. To the Instagram scrollers, I became Instagram content. To the student watching YouTube, I became a video that I might reach some.

It can be hard for us to change suddenly to reach our students. The phone that we have sometimes so desperately tried to get them off of is now one of our few means of reaching them. We have to change and adapt if we are to reach our students during this time. Let’s look forward to the time when this is over, and we come out the other side. It will probably be a hard journey, but we can persevere through this with God’s help and peace. When we get to the other side… Oh, how we will laugh and sing and hug each other, and praise the God who is always good no matter what!

Hi I’m Adam Drake! I have done 26 revolutions around the sun. (26 years old)
I work as a youth leader at St Clements Church in El Paso, TX.
I am currently in college and plan to start my master’s program to become a priest.