Unsettling

Over at my Tumblr, I wrote a brief post: click to read!

Having worked with kids for so many years, and just having worked with teens and other youth over the last couple years, I often forget how much more developed these people are intellectually. What that basically means is that your typical Sunday School answers just don't work anymore.

I've had the pleasure to have some really animated discussions with a few teens over the last year and a half. Most of the time, I'm almost 100% sure that what I had to say was not nearly good enough for them. And to be quite honest, I don't want it to be; I want it so that it stirs up their curiosity so that they can go search for the answers themselves.

Since coming to Calgary, I've sat in on some really interesting conversations during fellowship or Sunday school. And since I'm almost never the primary teacher, I don't usually say much. The times that I do say something is usually when someone directly asks me to give an answer. And even then, I don't give the answers I want to give because based on what I've learned and what I know, it takes far more than the fifteen seconds or whatever that I typically have to answer in a reasonable way.

Due to some unfortunate circumstances on a few occasions, I've really felt the need to jump in because the questions were being asked, but the answers were really bad. I'm not trying to throw people under the bus because the best questions that get asked are usually the ones that we cannot possibly answer. But even though we don't have a solid "this is the answer", we can take what we do have and provide a reasoning that kind of, to be frank, makes the question really redundant. And so when such a situation arises, I really feel an urge to say something (and it's hard to say this without coming across as cocky) in order to kind of "right the ship".

By righting the ship, it doesn't mean that I have the answer because quite frankly, I have asked the same questions before as well. The answer that I give is usually what I have come to at the time that I answer it based on my experience and learning. I know that there is no way my answer will ever be good enough, but it's only my hope that it's enough to get someone thinking enough so that they want to go search for the answers themselves. Therefore, righting the ship really means to just steer the conversation back into the right direction. Because quite honestly, I've heard some incredibly shaky answers that have the potential to be very disastrous.

Anyways, enough rambling (=

One more week until I get to be home for a week! Here's hoping to good weather next weekend!