The Bad News and the Good News About Miley...and all that

Given the amount of ink spilled this week on Miley Cyrus' graphic attempt to put the Hannah Montana image behind her forever, I didn't feel particularly compelled to add my voice to the mix. And I feel that, as with most flash-in-the-pan pop-culture moments, the real implications aren't always immediately clear. 

Instead, I'll just let you read what I've been reading.

Bad song lyrics: suggestions for addressing the music your kids are listening to

This one's not specific to Miley Cyrus, but it's more globally related to the whole issue of kids in a hyper-sexualized culture:

Three Things You Don't Know About Your Children and Sex

And parents, do you know about www.commonsensemedia.org? This site is a treasure trove of information on video games, movies, tv shows, apps, websites, and games. Definitely worth your time.

Here's to your ordinary kid

The British royal baby came into the world this week. He will live a life unlike any child, ever. From the moment he was conceived – not born, but conceived – little George has been a celebrity. And while most of us dream of fame and might fantasize about being royalty, the lesson for us is actually the opposite: as you watch this child’s life unfold, rejoice in your ordinariness.

On Tuesday morning, as the world waited for him to emerge from the hospital, one commentator noted that when the baby’s father, Prince William, left the hospital, there were exactly two television cameras outside. This baby came out to a crowd full of would-be Internet journalists, each armed with an iPhone. Poor kid. We can only hope and expect that every royal baby burp and diaper change will soon become mundane, and the little prince will be given at least a couple years of non-attention in the public eye.

But that’s not likely. And why? Why such intense interest in this particular child, when millions of babies are born every day? William and Kate made some perfunctory remarks about the baby’s looks and hair and their own excitement, but as Kate said, “any family” would know what they were feeling.

On CNN, one commentator suggested that this birth – and this life – was special because it stands in opposition to so much going on in the world right now: child disease, abuse, genocide, crime. But that assumes two things. One is that this child will lead a model life – in fact, an extraordinary life – exempted from personal heartache, tragedy, and dysfunction and untouched by the brokenness of others. In other words, that he’ll live a truly fantasy life.

The other assumption is that all of the rest of us live in a world pretty close to the dismal one described by that CNN commentator. And that isn’t quite right, either. New births, first steps, first words, and a child’s discovery of the world around them is part of our everyday world – and these things are every bit as miraculous and wonder-filled as when they happen to someone whose name begins with “Prince”.

The disadvantage this prince will suffer is that the idyllic expectations of the whole world for childhood will be upon him. The perfectibility myth that our kids labor under (the one that never quite pans out) will be magnified in him. Consider that, years from now, when stories hit the Internet about the little prince failing a spelling test, or getting a black eye, or arguing with his siblings, or not taking his college studies seriously – events so common to our shared broken experience it’s amazing that they can ever be considered “news”.

Meanwhile, you and your kids live comparatively ordinary lives. And you can be thankful for that. No photographers will be waiting in your driveway when you leave tomorrow. No one will be holding your kid under a microscope, examining every move. Kids are not royalty: not princes, not princesses. Why anyone would wish that on a kid is beyond me.

Today, be thankful for your very ordinary kid. Celebrate the ordinary but profound things they do. Take heart in the fact that not everything is hopeless – and you didn’t need a royal baby’s birth to prove it. At the same time, make every effort to take them down off the pedestal reserved for royalty. Kids need room to live and to grow, to make mistakes and to learn life lessons. They don’t need us to be anxiously fixated on their growth, as the popular press will surely be fixated on George. They just need us to be faithful.

Can Kids Outgrow God?

(originally posted August 2011)

During the last eight years of overseeing 4th-6th grade ministry at NCCC, I’ve had the parallel experience of watching my nieces and nephews grow up from babies to preschool and elementary school-aged kids. Through holiday visits, Skype, Facebook, and home videos I have been able to glimpse pieces of their faith development, and it’s been fascinating. I’ve observed prayers, Sunday school programs and songs, heard some Bible stories retold, and picked up some nuggets that reflect their young understanding of God’s big world and their place in it.

At the same time, I've witnessed each developmental stage and phase, and laughed with the rest of my family as the kids move from one obsession to the next. Blue, Dora, The Wiggles, Elmo, Spiderman, cowboys, and the Disney princesses have all had their day. But soon, each is eclipsed by the next favorite thing, and the old hero gets passed down to the next-youngest sibling. At their houses, Santa Claus is still alive and well at Christmas time. But this won’t last forever.

My hope, of course, is that their curiosity, interest, and affinity for God as they grow up will never go the way of Elmo. And that is my hope for your kid as well. It’s worth asking the question: Can kids outgrow God? Can he lose his currency, becoming yesterday’s news, just at the time when kids begin facing questions like, “Who am I?” and “What was I created for?” and “What am I worth?” Too many adults attempt to answer those questions with the very author of life shunted to the sidelines.

We dare not let that happen.

Does God live in storybooks?
I am a fan of Bible storybooks for young kids. Our family had one, and I still can recall “what Adam and Eve looked like,” and the fierceness of God’s wrath represented by a red sky, and the wily Jacob fooling his father into thinking he was Esau. Of course, those weren’t true pictures, but some artist’s rendering. But to me, they were “real." Young kids, being concrete thinkers, receive and store those early impressions and images for a long, long time. (When I was four, I thought our pastor and God were one and the same - probably the reason I still, without thinking, picture God having a red beard and not a gray one.) The downside to cartoonish representations, though, is that they can lead kids to believe that “Bible stories” and “Bible characters” were fictional. This is a symptom of a larger phenomenon that kids face as they grow. Bible storybooks are not the problem (not even a problem).

The issue is this: are kids’ conceptions of God allowed and encouraged to grow as they do?

We – the churches that serve them and the families that raise them – hold the key to the answer. To the extent that we “create” their understanding of God by the stories we tell, the symbols we use, the holidays we celebrate, and the way we worship (and countless other ways), kids’ knowledge of God is largely dependent on us. I do not deny that young children think thoughts about God completely on their own, nor that they can enjoy an unmediated relationship with him without any help from us. But that relationship does not exist in a vacuum. It is always culturally conditioned by the expressed thoughts and attitudes of the adults (that is, the authority figures) who run their world.

And so, we are responsible, not only for creating a picture of God that is true in their minds as young children, but also for continuing to refine and update kids’ views of God as they grow. If we are diligent about giving them Jesus when they are young, but then back off as they grow older, we run the risk that as kids grow up, they’ll consider God “kiddie stuff”, a relic from early childhood.

We dare not let that happen.

A different approach
As a kid becomes a preteen (and there’s no defining criteria for that), their ability to think and reason abstractly will blossom. As it does, they reach a junction in the development of personal faith. The question usually takes a form like, “Is God really real?” but what they’re actually asking is “Is God relevant?” As the serpent tempted Eve – “Did God really say you must not eat from any tree?” – kids also want to know whether God belongs only to the simple world they’re growing out of, or if he has a place in the more complicated world of the future? And if so, what is it?

About this same time, kids come to realize that parents and other adults aren’t perfect, that grown-ups break promises, aren’t superhuman, and actually get away with doing a fair number of the things they tell their kids not to do. What does this knowledge do to a kid’s faith, when up until that time, the adults in their lives have been the embodiment of qualities like power and might and authority and love and right – all of the same attributes that are ascribed to God? It’s common and almost unavoidable for a young child to perceive of God as a human. The concept of God being beyond human – that he is spiritual and eternal and holy? That’s a new one for older kids to make sense of.

And here’s another change: older kids exercise more leadership over their own lives. Young children make very few meaningful decisions for themselves. But older elementary kids get much greater latitude to decide who they’ll be and how they’ll act and how they’ll spend their time. And this is good – it is the birth of autonomy, which will someday lead them into life as an adult, no longer dependent on parental oversight. (Some preteen ministry colleagues of mine refer to this necessary stage as “Letting Go of the Bike.”) But, one of the skills needed to handle autonomy is the ability to discern good leaders from bad leaders. “Who should I follow?” is a key developmental step – it is the art of self-leadership. Older kids and adolescents are bombarded with cues about “how to be”: social cues, academic cues, family cues, cultural cues, internal emotional cues. It’s bewildering. Obeying God is suddenly no longer as simple as just obeying Mom and Dad.

I believe that to minister (literally, to serve or to meet the needs of) this age group, we ought to encourage and allow kids to bring God out of the box, out from the packaging he resided in when they were young children, and to meet, experience, relate, and walk with him in a new way. I don’t dismiss childhood faith; but neither do I rest on it. Young kids, for instance, say some pretty cute things about God. But what 10-year-old wants to be known for the cute things he used to say when he was five?

So, can kids outgrow God? In an actual sense, no. Of course God is big enough for all of our lives, and is always several steps ahead of us. But in a practical sense, yes. If we’re not diligent to push kids to grow in their faith – just as we would encourage them at this age to grow in athletic potential or grow in knowledge or grow in new experiences – then their faith will be immature as they grow right past it. I can’t help but think of a 9th grade boy I once led in a high school small group. We had just met, but it was evident he was attending youth group in body only. As he explained, “I figure I pretty much know everything there is to know about God.” How wrong he was, and how sadly his life unfolded in the years that followed, when he reached the point of his greatest need, yet God wasn’t even on the radar screen.

I don’t know what exactly brought him to the point where he thought he “pretty much knew everything there was to know about God,” but I suspect the culprit may have been one of the following:

• Church programs for kids that were boring
• Church programs that too closely resembled school
• Programming that mistook fervor (“Scream for Jesus!”) for spiritual depth
• Adults who talked too much and listened too little
• Music intended to glorify God but that was too childish to work
• Too-simple, pat answers to his questions

We will not let that happen! Growth is God’s intention for us. And growth implies change. An acorn is destined to become a shoot. A shoot is destined to become a baby oak. A young oak, while pleasing to the eye, is not meant to stop there, but to become a mighty, tall tree. In the same way, the Apostle Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” All kids want to grow up. (Yes, I know: if only we could convince them how great it is to be a kid!) We owe it to them to introduce and re-introduce them to the God who’s big enough for the future.

How do we help kids find their identities?

Every adolescent wonders, “Who am I?” Until they ask that question, they’re not really adolescents, not in a social-emotional sense. Identity is an anchor in our lives. What we do, how we behave, who we associate with, and what we value are all functions of what we say and believe about ourselves – who we are. The Search Institute says carving out an identity is one of the four key developmental tasks that all adolescents face.

What do Christians and Christianity have to offer preteens and early adolescents as they begin this journey of finding their identity? To begin with, let’s consider some pitfalls. In the 1960s, James Marcia famously identified four identity statuses. Kids in a state of identity diffusion had made no commitments as to who they were; the question wasn’t even on their radar screen, or they weren’t sufficiently bothered by it to act. Kids who were identity foreclosed had an assigned identity, but it wasn’t freely chosen. As a result, they hadn’t gone through the process of determining their own values and priorities. Kids who were in identity moratorium were wading through the classic “identity crisis”. Their values and interests might shift often as they jumped from one identity to another, looking for the right “fit”. Finally, kids who were identity achieved were those who had resolved the search for an identity and settled on one set of values and priorities and a future path that was relatively stable.

In brief, the four statuses can be summarized this way:

·      An Identity Diffused kid says, “I am…huh?”

·      An Identity Foreclosed kid says, “I am who others say I am.”

·      An Identity Moratorium kid says, “I am this” but secretly adds, “…maybe. But I might actually be this. I don’t know yet.”

·      An Identity Achieved kid says, “This is who I am.”

Identity formation matters because it lays the groundwork for the successful forging of intimate relationships. Quite simply, if I do not know who I am, how am I going to find close friends who complement that? If I cannot articulate and project an identity, how will others know if I am a match for them?

That’s why Erik Erikson, the American developmental psychologist, pegged identity vs. role confusion as one of his eight stages of psychosocial development, the one that specifically pertained to adolescence. Erikson theorized that we either achieve a solid identity during our teenage years, or we continue searching well into adulthood until we find one. And until we have it, we won't be able to settle into close, long-term relationships, such as marriage. The opposite is also true: prior to adolescence, it is neither developmentally imperative nor appropriate for kids to be locked into an identity. Kids under 11 aren’t generally worried about who they are in relation to the rest of the world. They’re kids, and they’re living a childhood that should be full of freedom: the freedom to try all kinds of things and either succeed or fail, the freedom to make friends with all types of kids, and the freedom to be without caving to the intense pressures to conform that they’ll face in adolescence.

That’s why too-early specialization is harmful for kids. You’re placing all of the identity eggs in one basket. A girl seems headed for stardom in basketball at age 12; if by 15 she’s burned out or injured, what’s left to fall back on? Now, I wouldn’t deny a boy or girl the opportunity to pour a lot of time into something they were passionate about: insisting that kids be “well-rounded” can divide their time and attention too much, so that they never have whole days to build models or play Legos or explore the library or discover art. Diving headlong into a new interest will open up doors to other interests, so parents should encourage it. (Within reason: buying a $300 guitar for a beginner is overboard when the $60 model will do.) But just as it’s dismaying to see kids who do “one thing” and only that thing too early, it also kills me to see kids who believe (because they’ve been told) that they can’t play baseball at age ten because they’re “not a baseball player”. That’s an inverse kind of identity foreclosure, happening even before the search for an identity has begun, and it is wrong. Let kids discover what they “aren’t” on their own. The world will be more than happy to reject them when they’re teenagers. They don’t need our help.

Here again, it’s helpful to remember how identity plays into relationships. Young kids (under age 11) generally are interested in the value of the activity: is it fun, and is it interesting? If it is, they want it. And every other kid who wants the same thing can be their “friend", because friends are people who share common interests. But from middle school-on, self-awareness dictates what I do. If it’s not “me”, I don’t do that. And neither do my friends. We share agreement about what works and what doesn’t, what’s cool vs. uncool. Friendships now have the potential to go deeper, because they’re based on compatibility (assuming that each person is putting forward a true self, and not a false self).

We see this shift in 4^th-6^th grade ministry. If we have a special event, 4^th and 5^th graders will ask, “What are we going to do there?” If it sounds fun, they’re in. But a 6^th grader will ask, “Who else is going to be there?” If, as a 6^th grader, I identify with the “they” who are going, I’ll probably join. If not, I probably won’t.

At our church’s preschool, they sometimes dress up in costumes. Or they turn music on outside and the kids dance. Can you imagine a preschooler refusing, saying, “I don’t dance.” Unthinkable! What do they mean, “they don’t dance”? Can they move their arms and legs, or bob their head? Then they can dance. But we understand perfectly well what it means when an adult says, “I don’t dance.” It means, actually, that they won’t dance because, well, it’s not them. This is a matter of identity. And when people who “don’t dance” suddenly break into dance, like at an office Christmas party, we’re shocked. Why? Because that’s not “like them.”

That’s not to say that young kids are completely amorphous and it does not mean you can make any kid into any thing (a corruption of the understanding of the role of nurture). Certainly we can classify kids as “quiet” or “high energy” or “artistic” or “athletic”. But design and later-chosen identity are not always the same thing, and this is key! My identity reflects the group I identify with. It’s the type of person I say I am, because deep down, it’s the type of person I want myself to be. The more this reflects who I actually am, the more integrity I have. Wearing the left shoe on your right foot won’t change that right foot. It’ll just give you sore feet.

So in one sense, achieving one’s identity is a narrowing: while you are saying yes to one thing, you are saying no to so many others. But in another sense, it is freeing, because no one can possibly be all things to all people. Achieving identity is becoming who you are and agreeing with it.

As kids enter this stage of forming an identity, what can parents and other caring adults do to help them? Here are some points to consider:

1. Christians don’t believe people are blank slates. Instead, while not denying the influence of environment, Christians believe that certain aspects of character are hard-wired into our design, and they are intentional. Nurture is not a process of adding components (as if building the perfect robot), but bringing forth and developing the strengths that God has given someone.

2. It’s essential that kids, when they are young, be allowed to try all kinds of things. That’s how they’ll discover not only what they’re good at, but also what they enjoy. They’re not always the same thing; I was a terrible golfer, but something felt good about being on a course and walking nine holes. I kept score, but it wasn’t the main reason I played. Put me in a tournament situation and I’d fall apart. Likewise, we who supervise kids’ involvement in activities must remember that, developmentally, the point is not to win, the point is to live. Keep score because that’s how games are played, but celebrate the effort and the process, rather than overemphasizing the outcome.

3. We can do great harm to young people when we choose their identities for them. It won’t work. In the short term, it might – but they’re just wearing someone else’s haircut. Remember that the refrain of an identity-foreclosed kid (sometimes unconsciously) is, “I am who others say I am.” Either they’ll continue down this road the rest of their lives (in which case they’re constantly looking to others to define them) or they’ll wake up one day realizing they have no clue who they are. Everyone needs to go through the process.

4. As a consequence, faith must be “their own” as they grow up. Let me be clear: by this I do not mean that young children cannot own their faith. A faith that’s not owned isn’t really faith at all. It’s not inappropriate to micromanage someone else’s beliefs – it’s impossible. It overestimates the ability of adults and misconstrues what happens when we learn. Without crossing ethical lines (i.e., brainwashing), you simply cannot control someone’s values and beliefs. At any stage of life, if we only give them a version of faith that equates to a set of adult-pleasing behaviors, but is divorced from relational spirituality (a capacity all human beings possess), we’re not teaching faith.

This leads to the most important point: Christianity is not an identity.

Certainly many Christians identify themselves as such. And we would hope that’s a label kids wouldn’t shy away from as teenagers. Didn’t Jesus say, “Whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven”?

So why do I say that Christianity is not an identity? Because Christianity is an inside-out religion.

I once demonstrated this at a chapel service at a Christian school. I began by putting on one of their football jerseys and then proclaiming myself to be a student of the school and a member of the football team. Clearly I was neither, and it didn’t matter if I wore the jersey or even the whole uniform. I was not, because in the eyes of the administration of that school, I was not, had not been, and could not be accepted as a part of that team. Not unless the powers that be gave their approval  - to me, or to anyone – could someone rightly call themselves or be considered a member of the team. And for me, more than half a life removed from high school, that would be quite a stretch! The administration would have to make a huge exception – an excuse from the normal rules – to get me in.

As Christians, that’s who we are: the exceptional ones. The “Power that is” – God – has stamped our application “Approved”, and not because we came to him with a perfect transcript or because we could run the 40-yard dash in four seconds flat. Only after we’re on the team do we get to wear the jersey; likewise, we must become Christians first (an act of God) before we can be Christians.

What does this have to do with identity formation? Everything! I think that we have too-narrowly construed what it is to “be Christian”. In some churches, everything – from the books you read, to the clothes you wear, to the music you listen to – is under scrutiny because “the Christians” are always on guard, suspicious for any sign you might give off that you’re not “with us”. As a result, certain types of people cannot fit in without conforming to the masses (unless they’re extraordinarily stubborn, obtuse, or self-assured). What types of people? Artists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, (non-praise and worship) musicians, filmmakers, public school teachers and college professors, skeptics, philosophers, and freethinkers, to name a few. This is an inevitable result of narrowing Jesus: a narrow Jesus results in a narrow gospel, where not only is the spiritual life only about getting saved, but where all of life is flattened to be just about "the spiritual" (as if you could separate that part from the rest of us). So if you can agree to be “like them”, you’re in. If you can’t, better try harder to change.

How backwards is that?

Now consider this from a kid/teenager’s point of view. You’re growing up, you’re spreading your wings, you’re taking on responsibility and preparing to launch and be on your own; in short, you’re moving away from a dependence on parents (by God’s design – see Genesis 2:24). And to underscore the point, you start to emphasize a little more all the ways you are different from your mom and dad. We all did this. But if the gospel preached to you is, “You must be exactly like us,” that’s a problem.

And this is why equating Christian education with the modern-day character education movement is such a travesty. Christian education is not just character education. Character development is one of the fruits of the supernatural relational dynamic with God, but it is a side benefit. It is not the goal. God is the goal.

Character education promises to turn out a certain kind of kid, and – ta-da! they’re all the same – and – ta-da! – every one of the virtues they hold happen to be the same ones adults prize because they make kids easier to manage. It makes them, in essence, little adults. Well kids aren’t little adults. And the developmental process, by which we grow from infancy through adulthood (and continue to grow) is not a product of the Fall. And that means that kids will do things as they grow that make them distinctly harder to get along with – and that’s not necessarily wrong.

Anyone who doubts this needs to go back to Luke 2 and read the story of boy Jesus in the temple. When Mary and Joseph were traveling back to Nazareth in a caravan, and realized after three days that they didn’t know where Jesus was – and that no one knew where he was – they hastily returned to Jerusalem, where they found him at the temple. And boy Jesus utters the memorable line, “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” This, in answer to the panicked question, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” Jesus gave his parents worry. He even spoke to them in a way that you and I might consider a little disrespectful. Yet in all of this, Jesus did not sin.

So it rankles me to hear things like, “Jesus doesn’t want us to be angry.” Really? I think Jesus does want us to be angry at some things, angry enough to act: Hunger. Injustice. Slavery. Oppression. What we really mean when we say that is, “I don’t want you to be angry,” because anger is an intense emotion and a disruption. It demands attention, and a constructive response. Jesus was troubled – even angry – by some things, and they should trouble us too. When we say we want kids to “be like Jesus,” it means all of him, not just gentle Jesus, meek and mild.

Too often “faith” serves as a straightjacket, narrowing kids to a prescribed set of behaviors. It’s a form of identity foreclosure, and we do that at our peril. Kids leave our churches for college and say, “You know what? That’s not me – and it never was.” How much better to grant that there’s great variety in the body of Christ?

Oh, God wants to change us. Make no mistake about that. The first thing to understand about identity from a Christian perspective is what Paul wrote in Colossians 3: “You died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” Well, isn’t that an argument for the narrowing that I was arguing against? I don’t think so. Because at the same time, you didn’t stay dead. God is birthing a new thing, a life “in union” with Christ. And the new life, lives!

A marriage is also a union. Two people come together and agree to start one life, together. Yet we would never insist that every married couple behave the same. Why? Because the marriage is a product of its ingredients. The husband and the wife each bring something to the union. When that union is healthy, it bears good fruit. It takes faith, but we must believe that nurturing a kid's relationship with God - inviting them, teaching them how to encounter God, giving them spiritual disciplines - is itself the engine of goodness. So preach that. Don't just preach goodness.

5. With all that said, the behavior of models is important to look to as we forge an identity. Why? Because only by seeing life lived out can we really make a value judgment about it. Who taught you sportsmanship? Did you read it in a book? Or did you watch someone you admired, and how they handled winning and losing and rules violations? (When I was growing up, my tennis buddies and I watched and looked up to John McEnroe, and...yeah.) Who taught you how to appropriately express anger? How did you learn to speak to your boss, and to subordinates?

This all gets modeled, and we pick up cues all the time. The Bible is not a how-to manual on behavior. The New Testament letters contain some “do’s”, but those are exhortations, not step-by-step instructions. So for a kid, what does it mean to be a Christian a college student? A Christian coach? A Christian businessman? What is Christian parenting? How does a Christian husband or a Christian wife behave? We are creatures of imitation. If you don’t believe it, listen to how expressions from popular culture creep into our everyday speech. (And you respond: “I know, right?” Exactly.)

Ultimately, assuming an identity is not just a statement about who I am; it’s a determination of who I’m going to be. So the role models I choose to pattern myself after matter. A lot. And a church can be a great place for kids to find role models who will guide them in living out life w/Christ.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes that he planted the seed of their faith, Apollos “watered” it, but that “God made it grow. Therefore, neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” Kids need to discover who they are. Our job is to gently help them recognize the hand of God in all of it.

It's Time to Talk About This: Depression, Suicide, and the Church

When I read that Rick Warren’s 27-year-old son had died, my mind immediately raced ahead because, well, 27-year-old people don’t just die. And when the rest of the statement confirmed that he had committed suicide, my mind jumped ahead again: “I’ll bet he struggled with depression.”

Right again, and how did I know? Because this script – person with a longstanding struggle that few people know about ends up taking their own life, to the shock of many who say they “never saw it coming” – is all-too-common. And because most people who commit suicide are, at the time of the act, depressed. Which means that the potential for this to continue shattering the dreams of so many families is great, in light of the fact that about 1 in 10 American adults have some kind of depressive disorder in any given year – 18.8 million people.

I’m one of them. Beginning with a terrible night in September 2004, when I had a panic attack that lasted more than four hours followed by five weird days of Xanax-induced fog, I sank into a depression that kept me tight in its grip for about the next six months. And it has really never left. Although the worst has passed for me, I still take my medicine, every day. I “live with” depression and, well, it sucks, because you wish you could get over it, the way you get over a cold: you feel it coming, you suffer through the worst of it, and then you start to feel better. Depression doesn’t work like that. The onset is often sudden, almost violent, and just when you think you’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel, the flame goes out. After a few cycles of that, you learn not to get your hopes up. Hopelessness then breeds helplessness, and the long-term price of untreated depression is usually schizophrenia or death.

I’d wager that every depressed person has at least thought about suicide, because you begin to believe that nothing short of dying is going to deliver you from that personal hell. That’s why I was particularly moved by the chilling anecdote in Rick Warren’s letter that when Matthew was 17, he said, “Dad, I know I'm going to heaven. Why can't I just die and end this pain?”

What keeps many people from acting on those thoughts is the fear of Hell, which points out a peculiar paradox when it comes to Christians and depression. You’d think this is a good thing, that it deters Christian believers from taking their own lives. The eternal fate of Christians who end their lives is a thorny theological issue and I won't try to answer it here (as if I have the answer). But let's just say the whole prospect sets you up between a rock and a hard place. The choice is between hell on earth, or hell in Hell? Great.

And what’s worse is you feel that you can’t talk about it. For all kinds of reasons, mental illness is taboo. It’s dark and, well, depressing. And that points to another paradox that exists in the church: the very things that will help depressed people get better – bringing it into the light, addressing it honestly and openly, getting people connected with treatment providers, surrounding them with people who can offer support and hope that life can be “normal” again – are the things that, for various reasons, don’t easily happen in church culture. They should, and they could – but they don’t.

I felt bad even bringing up what happened to Matthew Warren with some co-workers on Sunday morning, like I was raining on the Happy Parade. I apologized for doing so. Can you understand why someone who is depressed would feel even more inhibited about talking about their own issue? So instead, you withdraw. You isolate. You hold back from the very relationships and connections that could make you well. And you know it – but at the same time you feel powerless to act on your own behalf.

Depression robs you of your sense of self-empowerment. You feel like you’re inhabiting an empty shell. Like a cloud of discouragement and hopelessness is following you everywhere, and it always will. (Those commercials that say, “Depression hurts”? They’re dead-on.) Like the life has been sucked out of you. You lose the motivation to eat, to work, or to go anywhere. You become fearful and indecisive. You spend mornings agonizing over which shirt to where, or you stare endlessly at a restaurant menu before giving up and having nothing. You make plans to go somewhere and do something and then, predictably, back out because you’re not feeling up to it.

“Why don’t you just snap out of it?” No one was ever cruel enough to state it that directly, but that pretty much sums up a lot of the well-meaning advice and “encouragement” you get from other people. What’s doubly frustrating is that a depressed person asks themselves that very question, and gets no easy answer. It seems like fixing your problem should be simple, right? Go do something fun, go to a party, make yourself laugh. Look on the bright side. Get over it. But then you try, and fail. So you eventually fail to try. Or worse, things get better for a while, and you feel like, “All right – I’ve got this. I’m turning a corner…it’s gonna be over,” and then the sadistic hand of depression slaps you back down again.

Don’t get me wrong. There is recovery from depression. You can go from major depression to low-grade depression or even no depression; there is hope. But almost nobody gets better without help. And people don’t know how to help. And because of the nature of the disease, the depressed person will often reject offers of help. In fact, maintaining a friendship with someone going through depression is extremely challenging, because they’ll say they don’t want or need your help when actually, it’s exactly what they need. But it can’t be forced. Sometimes when you ask, “What can I do?” and the answer comes back, “Nothing,” that truly is the answer, for that day.

Unwavering support helps. Being patient and not forcing advice helps. Talk therapy helps. Medicine helps. And to Christians who criticize the use of psychotropic drugs as somehow unspiritual – because depression is all in your mind, and after all, Christ promises to renew our minds, doesn’t he? – I would urge you to slow down and reconsider that. Jesus made lame people walk. Yet it would be shockingly inappropriate to go up to a person in a wheelchair in one of our churches and tell them that if they had enough faith, they wouldn’t be in a wheelchair. Jesus gave sight to the blind. Yet we would never think of telling a blind person if they prayed more, they’d be able to see again. But people with depression hear these things all the time. And it does not help. It makes them feel guilty and responsible for what’s happened to them, driving them into an introspective spiral of How did this happen?/What did I do wrong?/Why can’t I be different?/Will it always be like this?

Yes, there are often identifiable events that trigger depressive episodes, and yes, understanding those circumstances and a person’s response to them is part of the therapeutic process. Depressed people are often plagued with self-defeating ways of thinking. But it cannot be ignored that depression affects (or is caused by, sometimes both) the chemistry in your brain. It is sickness, not just sadness. Everyone gets sad. Not everyone has altered levels of serotonin that need adjustment. So while it’s tempting to know what caused someone’s depression because that will help you jump to the solution, it’s just not that simple. Leave that to a therapist to help untangle. In the meantime, many – no, most – people with depression benefit from medication. It restores them to a level of functionality, so that they can think and do the things they ought to do to get well. Drugs will prop you up, albeit artificially – they’re not a cure, but they are part of the package of answers. (And a frustrating part, I might add. Some drugs work for a while, and then they don’t. Some actually induce thoughts of suicide – which is not an argument for abandoning medication, but for close monitoring of it.)

So who cares what caused it? Because even for disorders that are someone’s “own fault”, like obesity or heart disease or lung cancer caused by smoking, we don’t go around blaming them for their condition. Justified or not, what good would it do? To me, the very fact of disease and the presence of behaviors that enable it is evidence that something is very wrong with the human condition. In my religion we would call that sin, which is rightly viewed not just as individual transgressions, but more broadly as the brokenness (literally, the “not-working-ness”) that has beset us all. Bodies shouldn’t get cancer. It’s an abnormality. Knees shouldn’t blow out. Memories shouldn’t be stolen by dementia. And, people shouldn’t get depressed.

So if mental illness is part of the package of a fallen humanity, why doesn’t the church in America help? Because it ought to. But Matthew Warren’s suicide shines the spotlight on the fact that this is largely a hidden epidemic. Somehow we just can’t talk about mental illnesses – our own, or a family member’s – openly, the way we would acknowledge cancer or diabetes or a broken leg. I have to think that not wanting to bring people down has something to do with that. So does the fact that people just don’t know how to appropriately help. Unless you’ve been there, you don’t really get it. But I also sense the reluctance has something to do with not wanting to unleash something the church can’t deal with: that if you acknowledge it you somehow normalize it, and then people lose their motivation to change.

My response to that is that it already is normal; the breadth of this problem is huge. This reality is not shocking once you’ve experienced depression; suddenly, you become adept at picking out people in crowds who appear anxious, or you hear someone’s story and think, “I’ll bet there’s a family history of depression.” You’re usually right. The question is whether the church will face this head-on or if mental and emotional wellness will become one more thing that people have to go outside the church to find, because Jesus apparently doesn’t care about such things.

Secondly, the pressures of conformity and silence are not causing depressed people to change. As I mentioned above, getting out of the rut of depression means balancing out brain chemicals and overcoming ingrained patterns of thinking, and is not a matter of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. So if you think that giving people roles to play – like that of a hyper-spiritual, joy-of-the-Lord, only-heaven-matters cheerleader – is “curing” their depression, it’s not. They’re not changing; they’re acting.

But theologically, there is a fundamental misunderstanding the American church has adopted, that withdrawing love is the way to change behavior. Give that any amount of thought, and it fails. The way to change someone is to hang in there with them, giving them enough space to grow and to fail while knowing that you haven’t rejected them. I think we step away because it’s easier, like giving a child a time-out is easier than talking them through misbehavior: you stay over there until you can act decently, and then you can come back. What a horribly untenable position for the church in this day and age, and how contrary this is to the gospel! Instead, the plague of depression is a perfect metaphor for someone in need of salvation: you’re in over your head, you know what you ought to do but can’t do it (Romans 7:19), and you need the help of some outside source – first to do something for you, but then to do something with you. That second part – the walking it out – we’re not so good at. In the church we’re impatient. We want deliverance, healing, answers, victory! Getting into the mechanics of other people’s problems is messy. It’s hard for us to accept that some people who are depressed will always be depressed on some level; they will need constant, faithful support; they will not be cured.

Even now I struggle to see a redemptive purpose in anyone going through depression. It gives you empathy for others experiencing the same thing – but even then, for what? Some suffering makes us stronger, or more resilient, or softer, or more appreciative. Depression just beats you up.

It’s a little easier to see something redemptive for the people who have to deal with depression in a family member or close friend. I suppose you learn your own limits pretty quickly. It tests your patience over the long haul. I hope it teaches you that the solution is so much bigger than one person’s efforts, so that when things end tragically as they did with Matthew Warren, you don’t blame yourself. But I fear that’s not the case. I think there’s a lot of self-blame, and a conspiracy of silence in society and in churches doesn’t do anything to alleviate that. Let me encourage you that your efforts do count. And ultimately, you can’t make anyone get help, and even some who get very good help don’t get a whole lot better. But you feel alone when you battle this, and anyone reading this who has depression or deals with someone who does knows exactly what I’m talking about. Let’s unveil this thing, somehow, so that we all can be reassured that’s not the case. Statistics about how common depression is are one thing; meeting actual people who deal with it is another, and it immediately puts the scope of the problem into perspective.
And if you don’t know anyone with depression – think again. You probably know them quite well; you just don’t know that about them. Are you caring enough to listen; are you safe enough to tell?

How Christian Camping Helps Kids

If I could pick one experience for your son or daughter to have that would benefit them spiritually and personally, it would be a trip to camp. (If I were picking the one consistent, long-term factor to benefit them, it would be a great relationship with you.) I've often said that we can do accomplish more ministry in a weekend at camp than we can in six months of Sunday mornings.

Here's what happens at camp that you won't find anywhere else:

1. Kids get almost 48 hours unplugged. The loss of wide-open spaces and the hurried pace of modern life deprives us, to borrow the phrase of one of my seminary professors, of "our best apologetics partner." To see the dramatic rise of the mountains on either side of the camp, to leap across rocks in the creek, or to smell fresh air reestablishes our place in the created order, bringing us closer to our true selves. We were not meant to be enslaved by cell phones, computer screens, or even school textbooks. We are people who labor under the illusion that we've tamed nature. Wrong. Technology has tamed us. We need to be set free. This happens at camp.

2. Kids genuinely play. Some will say that kids these days have forgotten how to play, because they're too busy, too scheduled, too programmed. Don't you believe it. They may be busy and programmed, yes, but in an outdoor camp setting, the ability to make great fun from very little quickly re-emerges. This, again, is connecting us to our true selves. Play stimulates their imagination, requires compromise and conflict resolution, and invites them to approach other kids who it might not be "cool" to affiliate with at their schools. Play is a great leveler. This happens at camp.

3. Kids are surrounded by God, and godly influences. Adults sometimes focus solely on "the moment of decision" at camps, when a kid either does or doesn't respond to an invitation. This misses the point that a camp environment is itself evangelistic - all the time! From morning wake-up until lights out, kids are in the presence of caring staff and counselors who want to see their experience maximized. The counselors who will be spending the weekend with your kid are not strangers - they are the small group leaders who give their time to serve our kids every weekend in Surge, and who want to deepen their relationships by investing a weekend of their time. Forest Home's staff is made up mostly of summer camp veterans who give eight weekends January-March to make winter camp happen. They wouldn't be there if they didn't love your kids. I have never seen a discipline or medical situation handled poorly at Forest Home. Instead, kids receive empathy and kindness. This happens at camp.

4. Questions get asked, and answered. We cover a lot of ground in our weekend program, but we are inevitably rushed, and one thing I regret is that we can't be more responsive to the immediate interests of all of the kids. But because the time at camp is so relationally intensive (kids are constantly in the presence of their leaders), it creates a great forum for informal conversation, or for a leader to follow up with someone who had more questions than the nightly small group time could accommodate. What better way to model that God doesn't live "in church", and that our learning and thinking and talking about him doesn't have to stay within the walls of a church? Instead, God-as-a-way-of-life can go on display, even if it's only for a couple of days. This happens at camp.

5. Kids get connected in a hurry. If your son or daughter attends weekend services every weekend for a year, they'll log about 65 hours of church time annually. If your family comes every other week, that's 32.5 hours annually. Our ministry is made up of kids from more than 75 schools. It is not uncommon for a student new to our ministry to be the only kid from his or her school in the classroom on a given Saturday or Sunday. Hard to run into kids you know? Yes. Hard to meet other kids? It can be - it depends on how regularly a new family attends and what other outside events they engage in.

In a camp weekend, we're talking about 48 hours of sustained interaction with other kids and leaders, making it all the easier to return to church when camp's over. Kids relax when they don't have to worry about being new, when they recognize other faces, when they themselves are know. This happens at camp.

6. Kids make memories. Think about the most outstanding events of your life. Were a number of them from before you were in high school? I hope so. Every kid deserves that pack of loyal childhood friends, the thrill of family vacations and amusement parks, the freedom of after-school play, the hilarity of stupid jokes, the raw adventure of pillow fights. The heavy stuff of life will come; kidhood is for safely and successfully trying new things. Our middle school and high school students still ask me, "Remember that time at Forest Home...?" I often don't. But no matter. The memory is theirs. Kids need those. This happens at camp.

7. It's the easiest thing in the world to invite your friend to. Let's face it: it's not always appealing to ask your friend to come to "Sunday school" or anything where the default model is "school". But an outdoor camp in the mountains where you get to sleep in bunks and play outside a lot? Yeah, kids will go for that. Seven years ago, a couple of boys at our church invited their whole hockey team to camp. Today, many of those kids (now in high school) still attend our church. And research shows that kids who are comfortable sharing their faith, talking about what they believe (and this includes the openness to bring someone to the place they experience it all) are more likely to hold onto that faith when the going gets tough. For a first-timer, a weekend at Forest Home puts a great impression in their mind, because it's church camp without being churchy. This, too, happens at camp.

And I haven't even mentioned the teaching. But that's because the cognitive benefits are harder to assess, and in any case, they shouldn't be separated from the overall experience. They will soon forget where they learned what they know; but they will long remember what they did at camp.

There are ways in which camps are very primitive places. But then, we're primitive people, aren't we? And every kid who's dirtied their jeans hiding in a muddy spot or windburned their nose or soaked their socks completely when snow got into their boots knows this is so. More and more, these things happen only at camp.

Kids Need Choices

I think my favorite moment at our New Year’s Eve event (well, besides witnessing normally reserved kids get down with “Just Dance” on Wii) was when we handed each kid $9 and said, “You have a decision to make.” And the next five minutes was filled with something we don’t see often enough: kids having to think meaningfully about how to allocate scarce resources among unlimited needs.

And it was my favorite because kids learned powerful lessons in doing that, both about what they could do, and also what they couldn’t do. They learned this by having to exercise choices, something that is often sorely lacking in kids’ lives. We have so sanitized their world in the name of being a “child-friendly” society that I wonder if we’ve stunted their development by not making them – or allowing them to – do things for themselves.

The exercise in making donations was part of “A New Year for a New World” where we told the kids that 25% of their $40 registration would be given away. We gathered the kids and showed them four short videos about organizations and people they could give their money to, and then released them to do it. And when you’re 10, deciding whether the group that drills clean water wells should get 3 of your dollars or 4 of your dollars is an important decision.

Making decisions is a developmental imperative. I think it’s important for spiritual development as well. Here’s why. In the evangelical church especially, we are decision-focused: we want kids to make a decision to follow Jesus. Or, as an astute 15-year-old once said to me, “I think becoming a Christian is one decision for Jesus; but living as a Christian is like a million decisions for Jesus.” But here’s the key: how can we expect kids to make (the one decision) and stick with a decision for Jesus (the million decisions) if they are unaccustomed to and unpracticed at making decisions in every other area of their lives?

While we don’t deny that God works in the hearts of those who receive him, Christians should not be so naïve as to believe that continued obedience is simply a given. Look how the disciples struggled. Look at how often Paul had to exhort the new believers to “Stand firm” and to obey. People – kids included – will either make strong decisions on their own, or they will remain at the mercy of other people to make decisions for them. And in my experience, it’s the kids who can’t make decisions (because they’re over-managed and aren’t allowed to) who are most susceptible to peer pressure as teenagers. And why not? They’ve always looked to someone else to define their identity, to tell them what to do, to tell them what to value and what to think.

Strong decision making grows out of the opportunity to make meaningful decisions. Give kids choices – in every sphere of life. If they get good at making decisions where the outcome doesn’t matter much, chances are that they’ll also make decisions when the outcome matters a lot.

And you might be wondering, “What about the other dollar?” They gave away nine that night, but the tenth dollar went home with them. We simply told them they could use it to spend it on themselves, or to give it away, or to use it to make more money. The decision was up to them. And that’s a good thing.

A New Year for A New World

I always looked forward to the start of a new school year when I was a kid. To me, being in a new grade, in a new classroom, with a different set of kids than I was with the year before was a chance for a "new start". I remember thinking, "Maybe this year will be different than last year." I don't know exactly what difference I was looking for, but a fresh page of life seems to brim with possibilities.

That's kind of how we feel at the start of a new year, isn't it? Some of us will arrive at the end of 2012 and be sorry to see it go. Others of us have been ready to put this particular year behind us for some time. Whatever the case, this January 1 like every January 1 will carry a sense of "new beginnings" with it.

And then? Haha - after a few weeks, the joke's on us! Once we discover that a new year hasn't magically strengthened our willpower, that we still have the same bad habits and hindrances and burdens and tendencies (because wherever you go, there you are - still) and the year may be new, but much remains the same.

That's because many of us live life as if it were luck: "Maybe I'll win the lottery", "Maybe I'll meet the love of my life", "Maybe I'll land the perfect job/buy the perfect house/discover the secret to happiness" and we ignore the fact that Christians, of all people, should not be creatures of fate.

Christians do stuff. (I know, profound.) Sin and heartache and exploitation and destructiveness are on the move, so we need to be on the move against it. And what did Jesus say? That the gates of hell would not prevail against His church.

I've been thinking a lot about efforts to change the world lately, as we gear up for a first-time event with our 4th-6th graders called "A New Year for a New World" on New Year's Eve. Is there something distinctive about Christian efforts at world change? Is there something that makes Christ necessary in all of it? Or can any well-intentioned person make the same impact? After all, it's the Holiday Season, and for every recent story of tragedy or of a family who can't afford Christmas, we're bound to hear one about someone who stepped up to make things happy for them.

But that's the problem with these headline-grabbing relief efforts - they're short-term, and they're focused on restoring happiness. Sometimes I wonder if it's our happiness that's really in view. As in, "Oh, I can't bear to see those poor people suffering...let me do something for them," and then we pitch in until our own feelings of discomfort go away. Don't get me wrong. People were wonderfully generous after Hurricane Katrina, and Sandy, and the earthquake in Haiti and the Tsunami in Japan. But those natural disasters have become so common (to say nothing of man-made tragedies like school shootings) we can barely keep them straight. (Remember what happened in Joplin? I didn't. Look it up.) And the Red Cross, among other organizations, does wonderful long-term recovery work at disaster sites.

But I think back to benefit dinners or concerts that have been held for people I know who got sick or injured, all the time and money and attention that got poured into a single event, and then I reflect on the fact that that person is still sick. No one gets out of the woods because of one benefit event. Meanwhile, our collective consciousness has moved on, in part because we can't stand to dwell on suffering, in part because our brains can only remember so much.

I think what God furnishes to these efforts to help the world is this. First, he elevates and has elevated and will continue to elevate the status of human beings so that we bother to notice suffering and want to help at all. Christianity (and yes, I'm partisan) really doesn't get enough credit for the impact it has had historically on human rights and dignity. The influence of Christianity helped end two particularly heinous practices that had become accepted in the Roman Empire - infanticide and child sexual abuse, established the first orphanages and hospitals, advocated for the end of slavery and more humane treatment of the mentally ill, and promoted widespread education of the populace at government expense. We take these things for granted now. Then articles like this one jolt me back into consciousness and remind me we have a long way to go.

And then, after we've convinced that we should care, he gives us the resources to care. It's one thing to drop a quarter into a panhandler's cup. It's another thing to take the time to get to know them. It's still another thing to have the perseverance and the resourcefulness and the patience to walk alongside him to better his life. A few people I know seem to have what it takes. Most of us don't.

And so what God can furnish to us (can furnish) is the promise to make us like him. And the benefit of that is that God is a giving God. He gave us the world - he didn't have to. He gave you your life - but he didn't have to. He made the earth habitable, with just the right mixture of gases in the air and tolerable temperature extremes. When we mistreated each other, he gave us another chance. When he came to earth as a person himself, we mistreated him. Again, he gave us mercy. When the power of death was dismantled, he then gave us an invitation. And he gives his Spirit, his power and nature, to those who believe in him. He gives and gives and gives. We just give - and then we need a break. A one-time act of kindness is good, and I'll take it; but a revolution of kindness is built by faithfulness, one brick at a time.

On New Year's Eve, we won't change the world. Shame on us if we communicate that "because of this night, everything is different" and the work is done. If kids don't leave feeling motivated to keep giving of themselves, we will have fallen short. All we can hope to accomplish in 16 hours is to get the ball rolling, to excite kids' spirits and awaken their imaginations to what if? And of course, at some point, we all top out in kindness. We all top out in generosity. We all top out in patience. It's at that point that we need inspiration, and we need help.

The promise of a new world is grounded in God, who in Revelation 21 tells John that he is making everything new. The hope of the world now is to bring a taste of that future into the present. That's the essence of the kingdom of God. The transposition that brings the end of the story into the middle yields some pretty radical ripple effects. It is by those effects alone that we can say another year has any hope of being "new". Otherwise it's just the same old.