Teaching Kids To Walk With God

Though it was the middle of the day, it seemed like night fall.  The humongous trees of the Amazon jungle darted straight into the sky and formed a canopy high above leaving the surface below void of much sunlight. Eight medical residence students, three nationals, our guide, and I were walking a narrow trail deep in the jungles in Ecuador.  The trail was hard to follow and if it were not for the experience and instincts of our guide and the nationals, it would have been all but impossible to follow.  The brush, vines, and smaller trees had grown untamed for countless years and the only safe place to walk was to follow the trail of those who had been through before.

I learned that in the jungles, staying on the trail is critical.  It is the difference between life and death many times.  Staying on the trail is a reliable way to make it to your destination.  Getting off of the trail means the possibility of being lost in miles and miles of dense rainforest, attack by animals or hostile tribes who to this day reside in the jungles living a stone age like existence.
Those few days I spent in the jungles remind me so much of what it is like to work with teenagers.  Like the trail I was following, we want young people to follow Gods’ trail for it is the only sure and reliable way to live.  Yet for teenagers (and adults), life is like that jungle.  Sometimes the trail is hard to follow but leaving the trail has disastrous results.

How many times do we see children grow up in the church with a seemingly strong commitment to the Lord, but as the teen years approach, attitudes, behaviors, and friends change?   With this new set of behaviors (many of which are undesirable for parents and teachers) kids struggle with their relationship with the Lord.  The world pulls strongly in the wrong direction and the temptations are too great for many youth.  Slowly but steadily they step off of God’s trail and before long their life can become a train wreck.
As youth leaders, we have to become passionate about teaching kids to walk with God. Look at it like this; if you were a football coach, you would be passionate about teaching kids the game of football. Football would consume your conversation with the kids. As a coach, you would not play unrelated games for 45 minutes, eat cookies, talk about a white water rafting trip and then practice football for five or ten minutes at the end. No! Football would be your priority.
If you were a dance teacher, your students would learn to dance, not learn a better strategy for laser tag. Why? Because dance teachers are passionate about teaching dance. That is what they do.
Yet, oddly enough, youth ministry seems to violate all sense of common logic. Youth ministry may be the one place where the claim is to be passionate about one thing but, in fact, most of the time is spent doing other things.
Here is my point; we must be passionate about teaching kids to walk with God and we actually do it. We must teach them to walk with God. Just like a good football coach will teach the fundamentals of good tackling and a dance teacher will precision of step, youth leaders must get serious about teaching their passion – helping kids walk with God!

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