If I asked you, “What do you need?”
…you might be quick to cite physical things. Food, sleep, air, water, exercise.
…you might even go spiritual on me. Quiet time, community, prayer, Bible.
But, I think, few of you would acknowledge your emotional needs.
Yet… you were created with emotional needs.
Yesterday I shared with you PART 1 of some questions that our middle schoolers (Grades 5-8) asked anonymously about love and dating. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should. Because their questions were awesome. And super interesting.
You may have noticed that many of the questions our students asked yesterday were pretty light-hearted. Silly. Naive. Childish. Cute, even. But I think you’ll see that, in this next batch of questions, the tone shifts a bit.
So let’s get into PART 2 now. Here are our middle schoolers’ questions about “serious” relationships, marriage, and divorce…
If you’ve been working with middle schoolers for longer than 4 seconds, then you already know that some of the most confusing, emotional, exciting, and stressful things middle schoolers deal with are… the issues of love and dating.
In this series, we wanted to make sure we were doing our very best to address our students’ biggest needs and questions. We had some ideas about what we thought they needed to hear about love and dating, of course, but we couldn’t help but wonder…
Are we really being helpful?
I have worked with students for twenty years now. In those twenty years, I’ve had many parents ask me for parenting advice. Until recently, I used to cringe. I never knew what to say.
When I was younger, the easiest response was to shrug and say… ”I don’t know… I’m not a parent.” But then that changed, and I became a dad. Once I had kids of my own, I assumed I would eventually have a good answer. But even after 10 years of being a dad… I still didn’t know what to tell those parents.
Sure, I could have given a general “checklist” of things to do in order to be a great parent. But, I knew, unless the heart was behind it, none of that would really matter in the long run.
I want to talk about self care.
Now hang on. “Self care” isn’t as bad as it sounds. It seems as though “self care” is often equated with “self help,” and those words do not resonate well for most evangelical Christians.
I think it’s time to change how we view self care. Especially if you are in the trenches of Middle School Ministry.
To do ministry well, and for the long haul, we must care for ourselves. This is something very close to the heart of our Father for his children.