Light in the Darkness

As I think back over the past three months of Young Life, they have been jam packed, filled with activities, adventures, and lots of conversations.  This semester has been marked by the usual fall happenings of lunches, club, campaigners, pep rallies, volleyball games, football games, conversations over coffee, two different weekend camp trips, a night in cowboy’s stadium for our middle school friends, and so much more.

From the outside looking in this semester has been filled with smiles and laughter that fill rooms across Plano on most every night of the week, but a deeper look would reveal sweet and tender relationships between kids and their leaders that are filled with conversations in which kids share life's joys, celebrations, hurt, loss, and pains. 
 
I’m prone to want to fix things, to save others from their own situations, but as young life leaders we’re called to something different.  We're called to  share life with kids, to love them in the midst of their brokenness, to celebrate their joys, to suffer in their sorrows, and to walk along side them no matter what life brings.  Therefore the pain that life brings in kids lives, is impossible to ignore.
 
As we’re entering into the holiday season, I’m reminded that there is hope.  That all the loss, pain, and hurt kids experience, is overshadowed by the life and light that Christ offers and provides.  In John 8:12 it says, “When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."  This is my hope our high school and middle school friends in Plano.  That they will know and live in the light that Christ provides and that even in the midst of pain and hurt, there is hope!