JMJ
Question: Do you know what excites high schoolers more than anything else?
Gutters.
Yes, you read that right, and no, I’m not kidding.
Gutters.
At least, this was the case for the two thousand students at the Steubenville Conference in Ohio this past weekend. In typical High School student fashion, an inside joke was made, and for the rest of the weekend, whenever some said the word “gutters” the entire gymnasium would burst into applause. By the end of the weekend, I passed many students who had even taken the liberty of writing “GUTTERS!!!” in Sharpie on the front of their t-shirts. Needless to say, it was an interesting weekend.
As a youth minister, I took a group of five kids and one other chaperone with me to Steubenville this year. The conference is always a crazy weekend, one filled with sleep deprivation, inside jokes, and powerful encounters with the Lord, and usually in that order. I never got to attend one as a student, but this was my third year taking students as a youth minister, and it continues to be a blessing to watch my kids grow throughout the weekend. I usually have a wide variety of students who either have yet to take their first voluntary step toward Jesus, have been taking active steps toward Him for a while, or are somewhere in between. No matter where each student falls on that scale, they usually grow in some capacity, and it’s a great privilege to be part of that and witness that change in their hearts.
Another one of my favorite parts about taking students on a trip like this is watching them be kids. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a pretty big advocate for getting off the phones and devices and spending time outside and in community, and I go by that philosophy even more when I’m with my youth ministry students. That meant that, during the conference, they weren’t allowed to be on their phones most of the day. In the car, I even took all their phones and put them in the center console so they would have to be interacting with each other. They usually grumble about this at first, but it always ends up with a lot of fun being had. It’s a joy to watch the kids laugh and find joy in the simple things with each other. It never fails to remind me of the joy and simplicity in childhood and how we are called to have that same joy and simplicity in being the children of God.
The speaker who unintentionally created the gutter joke was making a comparison with confession - just like gutters have to be cleaned, so do our souls, which is what confession does for us. As we continued throughout our weekend, however, and I continued to witness these kids enter into childlike joy, I couldn’t help but think about how it can also represent what happens when we try to define or identify ourselves as something other than children of God. The other identities we try to define ourselves by can distract us from our true selves, hurt us when we fail to live up to those self-imposed identities, and detract from our ability to live in the freedom of being God’s sons and daughters.
Just as gutters need to be cleaned out from time to time in order to do what they were created to do, so should we continue to clean out our hearts of the things that are preventing us from living fully in the freedom that the Lord invites us to. Psalm 114:6-7 says, “The Lord is the keeper of little ones: I was little and he delivered me. Turn, O my soul, into thy rest: for the Lord hath been bountiful to thee.” I love this verse because it redirects us to our spiritual childhood. Our littleness is something that we can lean into, because it allows God to work in us. When we remember our humility in being His children, as opposed to thinking and trying to do things all on our own, we leave room for the Lord to show up. “I was little and he delivered me.”
Verse 7 embodies well the childlike joy I got to witness in my kids this past weekend. “Turn, O my soul, into thy rest: for the Lord hath been bountiful to thee.” When we believe, trust, and live from our identity as God’s children, we can truly turn to Him in complete faith and confidence and find rest there. This can, of course, look like rest in the literal sense, but I think it can also refer to a rest from being occupied or worried about what the rest of the world will think. We can rest from trying to please the world, as we know that there is nothing in this world that could take away our adoption in Christ. This is a beautiful example of how the Lord has been bountiful to us.
If you haven’t done so lately, I would encourage you to spend some time in prayer asking the Lord to reveal the things in your life that are covering up your true identity as His child. Ask Him to reveal those things to you, and then ask Him to remind you just how much He loves you and of the freedom He wants you to experience in Him. Allow yourself to be childlike, find joy in the simple things around you, and remember that it is in our littleness that the Lord longs to work.
Turn into your rest, for the Lord is bountiful.
Stay close to Him and have faith!
-Brandy
Scripture quotations in this post are taken from the Douay-Rheims translation unless otherwise noted.