You Came on Your Own Again

The sign-up sheet has a box on it.

Not a big box. It sits over on the right, after NAME and AGE and ANY ALLERGIES, and it says PARENT OR GUARDIAN SIGNATURE, and there is a pen on a string beside it that has not worked since March. Most people in the queue give the whole page about four seconds.

You take longer. You have a system.

Sometimes the system is doing it on the way in, with the folded corner of the page against your knee. Sometimes it is taking the sheet home and bringing it back next week, which is fine, because the trip is not for another month. Sometimes it is the sentence you have worn completely smooth: "Yeah, I'll get that signed." You say it lightly. You have said it enough times now that it comes out with exactly the right amount of nothing in it.

And then there is the car park at nine.

Everybody comes out through the double doors at once, into that particular bit of dark where the security light takes a moment to notice anybody, and there is a row of cars with engines running and headlights on. Somebody's dad is doing the thing with the horn. A woman is leaning out of a window shouting a name across four parking spaces. It is loud and chaotic and warm, and it empties out in about ninety seconds.

And then it is you and the bus stop.

Or you and the twelve minute walk. Or you and the bike with the light that needs a new battery and has needed one for a while.

Here is the part that would never fit in a strip, because there is nothing funny in it. You are not sad about the walk. Honestly. You have done it so many times that it is just the walk, and there is a corner of it you actually like. What gets you is smaller than that and harder to say out loud: nobody at home asks how it was.

Not unkindly. Nobody is against you. It is just that you go, and you come back, and the biggest thing in your week lands in the hallway and nothing comes off it, and you take your coat off and go upstairs.

And once, a leader said "get your parents to sign this" in exactly the voice of somebody who has no idea, because they have no idea, and it is nobody's fault, and you said sure.

So I am not writing this to sort out your house, and I am not about to hand you a job. You are fifteen, or thirteen, or seventeen, and on a Tuesday night you got yourself into a room about God with nobody making you go. I want to tell you what that actually is.

Nobody talked you into this

Start with the plainest fact in the whole situation, because it is the one that gets skipped every single time.

You got there. On your own. Over and over.

Think about what that takes, in the specific way it takes it. Not one enormous decision on one emotional evening, which is the version people picture when they imagine a young person deciding to follow Christ. Fifty small ones. Working out the bus. Deciding at half four, when the house is warm and there is food and a screen, that the walk is happening anyway. Getting the sheet dealt with by whatever route works. Going back the following week after a session that was, frankly, a bit rubbish, because some of them are.

That is not enthusiasm. Enthusiasm manages about six weeks. What that is, and I want to be exact about the word, is faithfulness, and faithfulness has never been a junior version of anything.

You have a faith of your own, and it did not reach you second hand. Scripture says let no man despise thy youth, and it says it to a young man who was already carrying the real thing rather than a trainee edition of it. The Holy Spirit does not keep a starter version behind the counter and a proper one for later.

There is a quiet idea floating about that a young person's faith is on loan from the adults in the house, and that it turns real afterwards: when there is a job, a mortgage, a considered view, a settled opinion about music. It is an idea with nothing underneath it. Nobody in Scripture gets put in a waiting room until their circumstances mature.

The boy in the temple heard his own name in the dark and did not recognize the voice, and the reason he did not recognize it was not that he was too young to be called. It was that he had not heard it before. He was called first and taught afterwards, which is the order it nearly always goes in.

You were called by name and not by household. Scripture has God speaking to a boy in the night while the man in charge of the building sleeps straight through it, and 1 Samuel 3 does not once suggest the call was provisional. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to reach a particular birthday before He starts.

Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.1 Timothy 4:12

Somebody drew you here

This is the part I most want you to have, because it goes underneath the walk and the bus and the box on the sheet.

Jesus said that nobody comes to Him unless the Father draws them. That is not a small sentence, and it is worth reading straight at your own Tuesday. On the nights the room was good and on the nights it was flat, on the way there and on the way back, a drawing has been going on. And it did not start with a leader, or with a friend who invited you once, or with a family who set a pattern you slotted into. It started with the Father, and it landed on you specifically.

You are somewhere on purpose, and the purpose is older than your postcode. Scripture says no man comes to Christ unless the Father draws him, and John 6:44 makes that drawing the Father's own work and nobody else's arrangement. The Holy Spirit has been doing it quietly in you since well before you noticed anything.

Now the empty seat, because it deserves saying properly instead of being stepped around. It is not a scoreboard. It measures nothing about you, and it settles nothing about your house. There are things you would love and do not have, and pretending otherwise would be no use to you whatsoever. Wanting them is allowed. It is not ingratitude and it is not weakness, and the ache of it is not a sign that something in you has gone wrong.

You have been given something to carry, and never something to prove. Scripture tells a young man to be an example in word, in conversation, in charity, in faith and in purity, and every item on that list is written in the present tense, as a description of what is in him already. The Holy Spirit is the One who supplies all of it, which is exactly why it reads as a description and not as a workload.

One more thing on this and then I will leave it. Nobody is putting your family on your shoulders. That is not your assignment, it never has been, and any voice telling you that the people at home are your project is not doing you a kindness. You are allowed to love them, and pray for them, and want them there, and carry not one ounce of responsibility for what anybody else chooses. God does not subcontract His work to teenagers. He does not subcontract it to adults either.