Teach me who I am

Jonathan Fraser, the Youth Minister was leading the service at Hilton Church in Inverness the other Sunday. The worship was led by a talented youth band, and there was lots of input from young people.

The service reviewed highlights of the church’s youth activities over the past twelve months, including the weekly Nite Life sessions, the visit Jonathan and some of the young people made to the Oban area supporting kids’ activities at local churches, and a summer trip to work with children in Romania.

There were vivid memories: of friendships formed in Romania, of watching a vivid sunset off the island of Luing, of a late evening trip in a small ferry, the night pitch-black apart from a million pinpricks of starlight.

One of our daughters has a tee-shirt proclaiming ‘No one can teach me who I am.’ It’s an uncompromising manifesto of individualism and desire for self-determination, an expression of resistance to people who think they know the kind of people we should be.

Some folk think Christians try to teach young people to be something they are not, by imposing on them an outmoded, disproven religion and nurturing in them a false sense of identity centred on an imaginary God.

This is not what I saw at church that Sunday morning. And in fact the whole service belied the words on the tee shirt as it reminded me how much we benefit from journeying with others, how much we benefit from openness to an anything but imaginary God, who knows better than anyone who we are.

Jonathan described asking a young person to give a talk during the Oban visit, someone who’d never done anything quite like it before and didn’t know where to begin. When she asked Jonathan for help, he simply said ‘Go and read your Bible and ask God to show you what you should say.’ She did this, and found some words becoming fresh and relevant, and she knew exactly what she had to say.

How different this approach is from imposing faith. It is instead a matter of modelling faith, trusting God, and encouraging a young person to take a risk in dependence on God, and grow in the process.

Jonathan also described chilling on a veranda with the Romania team members shortly before their return home, and asking them ‘How is it with your souls?’ It sounds impossibly cheesy, and it says much for the quality of Jonathan’s relationship with them that he got away with it.

The young people spoke freely, sharing, praying, growing together, learning from the experience of others and open to discerning insights from others. There was a sense that God was ‘doing things.’  I find it easier to say ‘God is active throughout the cosmos, active in the sunset and the star-carpeted sky’ than to say ‘God is concerned enough to be active in my small life.’

Yet hearing the reports from Romania you get the impression of people mutually enriching one another’s lives in the company of an active God.

Jonathan asked another young person, Fiona Waite, to speak that Sunday morning. Her initial reaction was to decline – she had not, she told Jonathan, felt particularly close to God in recent weeks. Somehow, though, she wasn’t comfortable with her decision. Ideas which insisted on being heard formed in her mind, and a short talk took shape. At 11.20pm on the Saturday night she contacted Jonathan. ‘Could I speak after all? I want to talk about Jesus.’

The next morning she spoke powerfully about her realisation that Jesus was her friend and her resolve to be a friend to God showing the same costly commitment which God brought to friendship with her.

It was quite obvious that Fiona was not saying what she thought we expected to hear. Rather with complete authenticity she spoke out thoughts she had been given. And as she spoke many of us, old and young learned, and were helped on our daily journey to be our true selves and so fulfil our potential.

I may say ‘No one can teach me who I am,’ but even while saying it I may be unquestioningly heeding my own damaged view of myself, strident voices in our culture,  powerful self-destructive impulses, and all the other rubbish which clogs up the quiet inner spring, the well of true selfhood.

I believe I can only drink from that well with the help of others and above all with the help of God who is the great Lake from which the spring within us flows.

The humble way, the better way is to say to our God, to our friends, perhaps even to our enemies ‘Will you please help me learn, today, how to know and to be my unique self.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 5th September 2013)