Over the last few weeks I have been helping at the local village youth club - taking over from an Anglican colleague who has moved on to pastures new.
Let me state that again so you realise the significance -
I - me who was bullied and terrified of teens for years - am helping to run - by choice! - the local youth club - not the ordered school classes but ad hoc 'hanging out' teens - and learning to enjoy it
It was the bullying that set me on the road to depression and to be a suicidal teenager who avoided other teens then and for years after that. At the end of last term I faced a school year of 14/15 yr olds which was a huge hurdle and terrifying - and they had their teachers to keep them in order!
So coming home one day in August to a phone call asking if I would get involved in the youth club was a step further. I agreed to go on the committee, and of course needed to go along to know what we were dealing with - but I wasn't signing up to all Friday nights, no way, not for me. Yet 3 sessions later and I am committed, the other leaders are weary and need fresh blood, the teens have potential, and through the advice of an expert friend who visited us last week I have ideas and am encouraged that even I could do something meaningful.
I find my own way of relating - I took some craft along and chatted over the doing, it is not me to just 'hang with the gang' but over a bit of woodburning I get over the gap and fear and it is just sharing an interest together then without trying general chat happens.
This job brings me face to face with challenges that my instinct is to hide from and I find that either I am able to survive it, or do okay, or sometime to actually learn to enjoy what I previously feared. Only with an assurance of God with me do I dare to confront things, and sometimes survival is the highest goal available.
But I want to say that the cords that bind us can be broken, they do not need to define our whole life, even if they have shaped our past.
Does that mean I live a life of total victory and joy - no. Life is too complex for that, but I can celebrate the gains, rejoice in the upward shifts and pat my own back even as I thank God.
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