I Aged Out Of The Youth Room

Half past nine on a Friday and the room is going, which is the whole point of the room.

Pizza boxes open on the floor with about four slices left in a distribution that suggests something happened. Two of them arguing about something so ridiculous that a third has started filming it. A boy on the beanbag by the radiator who is there every single week and says maybe nine words a night and would be devastated if it stopped.

And her, sitting on the arm of a couch with her feet on the table, doing the thing she does, which is being about eight percent more relaxed than the situation requires so that everybody else can be.

Nine years. She started at twenty-four and she is thirty-three now.

They still like her. That is not in doubt. Two girls waited for her outside last week for eleven minutes to tell her something they had not told anybody.

And she is good at it. Better than she was at twenty-four, actually, by a long way, because she has stopped needing them to like her, which is the thing that ruins most people in that job.

And somewhere around year six she stepped outside herself for a second on a Friday night and noticed something that she has never once said and would find almost impossible to say.

She has aged out of that room.

Not out of the ability. Out of the fit. There is a version of her that lives in there, that talks in a certain register and finds certain things funny on cue, and that version was completely honest for about five years and is now something she puts on at ten past seven and takes off at half past ten.

And there is nobody she can say that to. The teenagers would hear it as rejection. The person who oversees her would hear the first half of the sentence and start planning a transition. And she does not want a transition. She wants to say a true thing out loud and have it not cost anybody anything.

Where this is not going

Straight up, because you can spot a lead-in from across a room.

This page is not going to tell you to step down, hand over, ask for a break, or talk to anybody. Not tonight and not by suggestion at the end. I cannot see your church, your teenagers, or the boy on the beanbag by the radiator, and a page that cannot see them has no business steering you.

And it is not going to tell you what you are meant to be doing instead. There is no list at the bottom and no exercise coming.

You are not being nudged toward an exit, and there is nothing you have to decide about any of it tonight. That is not me being cautious. Scripture is what makes room for the true sentence before any decision, and the Holy Spirit has never once required somebody to have a plan before He would meet her.

A season is a category, not a verdict

Here is the sentence I want in that room with you, and everybody has heard it and almost nobody applies it to themselves.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.Ecclesiastes 3:1

Read what that is doing.

It is a category. It says that things have seasons in the same tone you would say that things have weight. Not as consolation, not as an excuse, not as something you reach for when a thing has gone wrong.

And notice the second half. A time to every purpose. Purpose, not failure. The list that follows is not a list of things that went badly. It is planting and building and dancing and keeping silence, and every one of them is right in its time and wrong out of it.

Which means the sentence you cannot say is not a confession. It is a description of a category the Bible already has.

You are living inside a category Scripture named on purpose, and the ending of a season has never once required a culprit. I am not stretching that. Ecclesiastes 3:1 states it as a property of things rather than as a comfort for people who failed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and hands somebody a word for what she has not been able to name.

Good at it and not in it are both true

Now the thing that has kept you silent, said plainly.

You have assumed that being good at it settles the question. That a person who is still effective, still liked, still better than she was at twenty-four, has no standing to say the room is not hers anymore.

That is not how seasons work and you know it from every other part of life.

A person can be excellent at the thing they have outgrown. In fact that is the normal shape of it. Skill is what accumulates over nine years, and fit is a separate measurement, and there is no rule anywhere requiring them to expire together.

You have not been faking for three years, you have been skilled in a room you have grown past, and both of those are true at once without either one canceling the other. The word puts times and purposes side by side without embarrassment, and the Spirit who searches all things has been on that couch arm every Friday and has never read the second half as dishonesty.

And the cost has not been the Fridays

Here is the deeper thing, and it is not about the youth room at all.

For three years there has been a real, weekly, describable fact about your life that has never been said out loud to God. Not because you were hiding. Because the only phrasing you could find would cost somebody something if it got out, and so you did not even say it in private, in case saying it started something.

Which means you have been carrying it alone instead of handing it over, and that costs several times what the Fridays cost.

He has known since year six.

You are welcome to say the sentence you cannot say to anybody else, and He has never once asked you to keep wearing a version of yourself in front of Him. The word is full of people saying flat, unresolved, inconvenient things to God without dressing them up, and the Spirit who was given to help us is not waiting for a safer draft.