It once again has been almost a month since my last post, and so often I have what I feel like are great ideas but alas never follow through to get them up on this blog. Seeing however that I created this blog as a way to keep people involved in the ministry and struggles therein I will confess a couple of struggles that I have known are weaknesses for a while but have done little to take action on.
One thing that I fail at is technology, I know many of the things that I should be doing yet don't follow through to educate myself on those things. Facebook for instance is one of those things that for personal use has been really cool and fun, but translating it to a tool that I use for my ministry has been more difficult. And most youth ministers these days are on top of those sort of things. I desire to be on the "cutting edge" yet I have not found the balance of how it works with my personality and interest in ministry. Maybe it doesn't and I have failed to recognize that. I mean should it be easy?
Either way everything is moving so fast in our society today maybe I should be slowing it down for students? Seems like everyday there is something new added to the technology spotlight, I'd have to say that Jesus seemed to keep it pretty simple. He focused on building relationships and meeting new people, but then again teens today totally rely on the internet to build relationships with friends. They go home after school and will spend 4 hours chatting online with friends instead of out actually hanging out with them, or they will text all day instead of having an actually conversation. Well now it seems like maybe I am talking about two different topics, my own deficency in being knowledgable about new technology, and students struggles to know how to really communicate. Its obvious how the two effect one another and at any rate it all has been on my mind lately and has become a bit of a struggle to work through.
The other weakness/struggle that I have been having is more personal, and more of a conviction that I have had. My prayer life has revolved more around myself recently and less on the high school and the students that inhabit it. Last night at Campus Life it was very apparent that there was something lacking...prayer. I had the evening all planned and my lesson worked out and ready, but it didn't seem to matter how prepared I was those students were nuts and unattentive. Not too unusal for high school students but it felt different and once I began to reflect on it I realized prayer had been totally absent from my preparations and delivery on the evening. Huge mistake, but I hope to move forward with this experience to remind me that the most important element of my ministry cannot be missing. I have done well to enlist and invite others to pray for Royal Palm Beach High school, and Campus Life, but have obviously lacked in following through with the task myself.
