Growing into Greatness

The Scripture says that the human condition is one of “alienation.”  As a race, we are tragic and broken. We are not what we were meant to be, and we see it in our sin and our self-disgust.  One of the most poignant observations ever made, came from the mouth of the wise king, Solomon.  He once wrote, “He (being God) has placed eternity into man’s heart” and followed that statement with these words “…yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”  In simpler terms, God has made man distinctly aware of his finitude, by fashioning an appetite for infinitude within his beating heart.  The point being, Man was meant for greater things than this material life.

That is the premise.  Hold on to that thought while I start unwinding a related thread.  Young people, adolescents, teenagers, for the most part all go through a stage of mental, emotional and physical change.  ”Puberty.”  It’s an awkward topic, no doubt about it, and it is appropriately so, for it describes an awkward process that makes for awkward changes resulting in awkward situations. But despite all the awk, there is a lot of grace in the midst of it.  You see, one of the most beautiful things about this phase of development, is the nascent bud of that divine appetite, which I mentioned just a moment ago.  As boys become men, and girls become women, there is an ember of hunger for greatness that begins to glow.

I have heard it often before, and I expect I will hear it much more in the next few years as I continue doing youth ministry. The phrase, “Nobody understands me.” or some variation of it, seems to be the ongoing theme for this stage of life.  Maybe you’ve heard it too, (we have all known our fair share of emos). However I’d like to propose that the spoken phrase is unfinished.  What’s really being said is “Nobody understands me in a deeper way”.  See, I suspect that when young people begin to develop a taste for the deeper realities of life, they also develop an awareness of the depth that is within them, a depth that was for them hitherto previously unattended, and unnoticed by others.  But having stepped into that wonderfully illumined place called adolescence, they suddenly feel strangely neglected, and maddeningly misunderstood.  What they need, is someone, or some word, that speaks to the deep within.

Souls were fashioned to contain eternal truths.  This should help us determine what to teach young people.  Surely, appealing to hip teenage superficiality is not the answer to reaching this generation.  What we need is a deep and satisfying draw of Eternal Truth.  So that, as these young people grow into their bigger bodies, their souls also grow into this unseen reality, called Greatness.