Being a minister is a strange job - every day is different, this week I will be talking to a large group of yr 10 pupils of one of the local schools. It is part of their RE class and I am to talk about the spiritual life. I could do a profound presentation on the christian spiritual tradition, but instead I am going to talk about the spiritual life of the Weeble!
Basically I have very few positive memories of being their age, I was a misfit, bullied through primary and comp. As a teenager I tried to rush into being an adult, and I am grateful for the coping strategies I developed in sealing me off. The alternative route - trying anything to be accepted - could have led me into some seriously damaging paths.
Not that my own survival plan didn't leave scars - I left the barriers up for so many years that I failed to learn how to be me or to be with others. It is only during counselling following a full depressive breakdown a few years ago that I had to dig myself out from behind the then collapsed walls.
Since then I have been a woman with a mission - to let people know it is ok to be one of the wobbly ones. We all are in some way or another at some stage in life, but because society and stigma discourage us from talking about problems that are emotional or relational we often carry things alone when we could be helping each other along.
So back to the 14/15 yr olds - my spiritual life has been shaped like the rest of me by the tough stuff in life, my faith had its ups and downs in that but at the depths I found God was there too. So that's what I want to tell them about spiritual journeys.
No comments:
Post a Comment