Let me tell you this whole social media world that teenagers live in is a rabbit hole of epic proportions. I was pretty creative when it came to doing nefarious things with the opposite sex when I was in high school, but 1) the tools that teenagers have now is staggering and 2) their ability to use them creatively to keep from being caught is pretty amazing.

Of course part of the problem from a parent perspective isn’t that their kids are trying to hide things it is the exact opposite teenagers are putting way too much of themselves out there and as such are opening up a whole new level of potential problems.

I keep thinking about me back in middle school. I was a big kid sort of goofy and not popular by any standard at all. In fact I was tormented for a while and generally ignored or lightly bullied for much of my teenage years. BUT I had a good home life and parents who loved me and a decent church (even with only a few students my age) and when I wasn’t at school I wasn’t around people who wanted to bully me. I could leave that world and enter into the world of parents and love and acceptance.

But these days the world that teenagers live in doesn’t have those defined boundaries. They are always sharing their lives and living in a world where everyone they know can “like” what they say, what they wear, and what they look like with just the touch of a button. Is it any wonder that teens are showing more skin online because that is a quick way to make sure that you are at least nominally “followed.”

Anyway, I have been digging through a bunch of stuff and trying to find where I am going with this and I am not quite there yet, but here are some cool things I have found online.

These first 3 are all connected:

http://www.cpyuparentpage.com/

http://www.cpyu.org/Default.aspx

http://www.digitalkidsinitiative.com/

Here are a couple of other good articles I found. Be sure to check out the Snapchat parents info. It is something that parents should, but probably didn’t read.

http://dotcomplicated.co/content/2013/02/moms-how-to-keep-snapchats-disappearing-act-from-giving-you-lasting-migraines/

http://adammclane.com/2013/01/23/snapchat/

http://taylorandsarahbrooks.blogspot.com/2013/04/parents-word-about-instagram.html

http://www.snapchat.com/static_files/parents.pdf (this is a PDF)

I came across this article today and I wanted to share it. Here is my pull quote:

 The truth is, we’re all born into toxic water—there’s not a person on earth who has escaped the “sin bath.” That means all of us, to use Lady Gaga’s template, are “born this way.” Some of that toxic residue is more culturally acceptable—greediness, selfishness, insecurity, anger, narcissism, and so on. The truth is, we’re all born with a proclivity for something(s), and our environment often triggers what is latent and makes it active. All of us must wrestle-out the consequences and influence of sin in our life.

It goes on to say that natural inclination to sin doesn’t excuse sin, and continues to wrestle with some of these issues not a academic ideals, but as real life happening.

You can check out the full article here.

Why are we OK with gossiping about someone else’s sin?

Why are we so defensive about God, the Bible and the church? Do we think God can’t handle himself?

Why are we so scared of sins that others have, but perfectly comfortable with own own Apathy, anger, greed, and envy?

Why are we more concerned with being right than we are with being heard and understood?

Anyway, that got me thinking about how different the world is now and how much there is to sort of have your head around as a parent. Now that everyone has Facebook where are the teenagers? What are they sharing? How are the sharing it? What sort of boundaries do you need to place as a parent? Will those boundaries even work in a world where teenagers carry the whole world in their phones?

These are just a few of the questions that have been running through my head, so I thought it would be cool to pick up a study for parents so they could know what was going on with their students. I picked up “A Parent’s Guide to Social Media” and read it in an afternoon. It is a great big picture idea of social media focusing on the thoughts and attitudes more than the technology.

What I am looking for now is some newsletter/magazine article where someone has looked at what is really happening tech wise so I can pass that on to my parents. So if you have anything like that please leave it in the comments.

(On a side note, that I want to pursue again sometime with the new world of sexting and such catch phrases like “True Love Waits” don’t go far enough anymore. Those programs always were about purity, but for some reason got taught more often than not as a speed limit. They were taught as restrictions. The problem looking at purity as a restriction is that you can do whatever you want right up to the line (whatever you line is). Somehow we need to figure out how to teach the heart issue and then let that issue deal with keeping people from chasing things they shouldn’t on the internet)

We won’t win this argument by bringing corporations to the ground in surrender. We’ll engage this argument, first of all, by prompting our friends and neighbors to wonder why we don’t divorce each other, and why we don’t split up when a spouse loses his job or loses her health. We’ll engage this argument when we have a more exalted, and more mysterious, view of sexuality than those who see human persons as animals or machines. And, most of all, we’ll engage this argument when we proclaim the meaning behind marriage: the covenant union of Christ and his church.

You can read the full article here: http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/03/25/should-christians-boycott-starbucks/

What if we could find a place where real conversation could happen? What if we could find a place where we din’t have to yell or fight or assert ourselves? What if there was a place where Christians were mad because they weren’t the big kid on the block anymore and so they could have honest discussions without lashing out and being upset that they are being questioned? What if we found a place where the goal wasn’t to prove we were right, but to help people find the God who is right? What if we were more concerned about showing people Jesus and then letting Him offend if he must?

I haven’t been here at Confessions of an Average Youth Minister for a long time, mainly because the things that I need to confess feel like they are counter to what most of the church has to say these days. I want to talk about opening up a dialog. Not saying that the other side is right, but saying that the way we are saying they are wrong isn’t helping. (and maybe, just maybe some of the things that we are saying are right may not be right. I mean they kicked people out of the church for saying the world was round at one point in time).

So I guess what I am saying is that I am slowly finding my way back here. If you don’t want to wait around I will understand, but I am going to try to work through some of my frustrations with the vocal angry side of Christianity at least that way my wife doesn’t have to listen to it all.

I have been saddened by the number of people who I have heard recently who casually speak of buying guns and carrying them around.

While there are some people who are really wresting with the implications of such a choice there are many more who just think, “They have one so I have to have one. They are going to be violent so I have to be violent in return” When did our world become “The Walking Dead?”

And when did Christians become the people who are arguing for an escalation of violence? I know that there are no easy answers and I don’t believe that government intervention stops much of anything, but I also believe that Christians need to take a serious look at what it means to take a life. How can we as a group be so gung-ho about something so life-shattering.

Now please don’t say that I am advocating we all give up guns. This is ‘mercia after all. But what I am saying is that maybe when it comes to violence the first response shouldn’t be “let’s make sure we can be just as violent.”

This is my MLK quote for the day. This is what we teach our children. So why do we act so differently.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this is why the gospels are full of Jesus stories rather than a long letter describing Jesus. They aren’t a list of qualities, a resume, or even one friend describing someone to another. The gospels are a collection of stories and teachings and in those we find the personality, the passion, the heart of Jesus.

So anyway, I wanted to demonstrate that so I came up with the idea of the students creating their own characters and putting those characters into a situation to see what we can learn from them.

Here with the activity:

Use the space below to come up with a 1 or 2 sentence character sketch. Your character can be real or made up (probably easier if they are made up). Your sketch should start with “___________ was the type of person who…” or something very similar to that. For ideas check out the examples below.

Wes was the type of guy who always had the right answer at least he always thought he did.

Ellen was the type of girl who cried at old movies. She rarely cried over real life things though, her life at taught her that crying over those things didn’t do you any good.

After you have finished your sketch I will put some scenarios on the board. Choose 1 of them and write a 2 or 3 sentence story of your character’s response to that scenario. 

(These were the scenarios I put on the screen:

Trapped at the end of an alley by a big barking dog

Confronted by a loud-mouth ex-boyfriend or girlfriend

Someone trips and falls in front of him/her walking down the street and appears hurt)

Some Notes:

• I made sure everyone had a character sketch before showing the scenarios. This helps to establish a character that will react instead of creating someone specifically for a situation
• I had everyone share their sketches with a partner
• After they had written the scenarios I had them share those with a partner as well
• I had a few volunteers share their scenarios with the group (not the sketch, but the scenario) and the group tried to figure out what we could learn about their character’s personality.
• I did find that I needed to remind students to make a story, not just write a description of what their characters did, but in the end that worked out fine.

So in planning this activity I knew of probably 2 students who were going to just eat this up and that I was probably going to get groans from the rest of them. But I decided to go ahead with it because we don’t do as much for the creative writer people as we generally do for the artists and performers in our group. So I ran with it. As we started I even made this same basic disclaimer stating that I knew it wasn’t for everyone, but just give it a shot.

What happened next surprised me. I had a few initial complaints, but then everyone at least created something. What else surprised me was just how good some of the scenarios ended up being. I mean, they weren’t high art or anything, but from the two or three paragraphs the whole group was able to identify some of the personality traits of the made up people.

It helped us then to go and look at a couple of the stories of Jesus in the Bible and try to see what the gospel writers were showing us about His personality. It made for a cool lesson.

All of this makes bed times at our house particularly trying some times. I am sure that I am not the only one who has these sorts of nights, but there are times when he decides to get up multiple times to come and tell us something. We now have a pretty hard and fast rule that says if you get up out of bed you are in trouble. This rule works on my 6 year-old. He is afraid of getting in trouble. My 3 year-old doesn’t like to get in trouble, but the fear of it doesn’t keep him from doing what he wants.

So I told you all of that to tell you this. The other night I was sitting on the couch watching television when I see my youngest son walking down the hall. He is walking in the hall, hall light on, right past me, but he is walking slowly and he hiding his face from me with a pillow. Yes, that’s right my son was trying to hide from me simply by hiding his face from me like I am going to think it could be any small person in his pajamas slinking down the hall towards his mother.

Needless to say he was in trouble (even though it was hard not to laugh at him, especially when he smiled real big at me in a way that made me think he may have known he wasn’t really hiding, but was hoping I would just play along). But I couldn’t stop thinking about the audacity of the kid to think he could hide when I could still see him.

I think most Christians live this way when it comes to God. We act like He can’t see us and in the light of day (or maybe more accurately when we are alone at night) we do what it is that we want to do instead of what He has told us to do.

So when I start acting in a way that I know is against God’s best for me, I am trying to remember my son walking down the hall with a pillow over his face because that is essentially what I am doing. I have to know that God can see me and that the consequences of my actions are something that I will never be able to hide from.