Well, we’re well on the way into this New Year but my reflections for this coming year bring me nothing but excitement as I look ahead to what God has in store for the young people and the community of Emsworth! I took some time to listen to God for the New Year and read the NLT version of Genesis 1, the account of creation. The thing that leaped out at me was that God said there would be light and ‘that is what happened’. I also read Luke 1, of the birth of Jesus and John the Baptist and found again those words ‘God can do anything’ he can bring a child into the world through the Virgin Mary and she is blessed because she ‘believed that what the Lord said would really happen’. Also that day I heard the great wisdom from Duggie Dug Dug, so in the words of Duggie Dug Dug: ‘have we made our God too small?’ What incredibly good news that Is, nothing is impossible with God! Have you ever found yourself saying there’s something you simply cannot do or something that cannot happen? Maybe you need to ask yourself Duggie’s question and remember that we have a God who can do anything!
...so in the words of Duggie Dug Dug: ‘have we made our God too small?’
Following on from my last instalment about what it’s like to be a young person in modern society it seems to be a focus for the year from the Arch Bishop of Canterbury’s New Year speech. Dr Rowan Williams pointed out that young people are a minority group, most of who don’t identify with the violence of last year’s riots and yet the few as ever give the majority a bad name. Dr Rowan Williams asked ‘what kind of a society lets down its young people by treating them with suspicion and negativity?’ in response to the feeling in society that young people on the streets are to be avoided. He argues that the energy that can be released when young people feel safe and loved, can flourish for everyone’s good. Young people don’t need to be made to feel unwanted and useless; they need guidance to release their gifts. Dr. Rowan Williams finished his speech by saying ‘being grown up doesn’t mean forgetting the young’ and that we need to ask ourselves how we can make friends with our fellow younger citizens for the sake of our happiness as well as theirs.
‘being grown up doesn’t mean forgetting the young’Arch Bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams
Robin Rolls, the Director of the Arch Bishop of York’s Youth Trust, writes in the Youthwork Magazine that devices have been made for the use of police that emit a high pitched noise aimed to only affect those under 20 to move them on. If any other minority group were treated like this we would be outraged! Young people are not just a minority group but a vulnerable one at that and yet society seems to accept that they are targeted in a negative way. The Bible has many examples of young people being used to do God’s work, often the people that would have been last in line to do anything important have been instrumental in some of the amazing things God has done. There is some thought that even some of the disciples were much younger than Jesus when he called them, so you could even say that Jesus was a youth worker! If the kingdom of God belongs to people such as youth, surely we want to be focusing our energy on helping them to realise their amazing potential in Christ. What I also need to remember is that the solutions to these issues surrounding young people are not about me, I am not the expert, I am not young people’s saviour, the solutions lie in working together as a community to help young people and essentially it is all about our God who can do anything, the credit belongs to him!
