“Mrs. Deitz! Mrs. Deitz! I know God, he has a beard and wears sandals!” A young boy jumps up from his chair and exclaims an answer to my question, ‘What does God look like to you?’ All over the room I’m hearing, “He has a beard!” “He is nice!” “He is really really tall!” Another young girl with long blonde hair, deep blue eyes concealed by thick lines of blue eye liner calls out, “I know! I know! God is caucasian.” She leans back in her chair so that it balances on the back two legs, looks at me as if waiting for me to challenge her and then loses her balance.
“How do you know God is caucasian? Do you think Jesus was caucasian?” I decide to deliver the challenge and ignore her inability to sit still. “Wasn’t he from the middle east?” I asked. I mean these are 6th grade students, shouldn’t they know a little bit about geography?
She looked at me and narrowed her eyes. In the background I heard, “But Jesus isn’t God.” My head snapped around. “What?” I threw up my hands. “What have you guys been learning in CCE for the past 5 years?”
The young girl with the attitude spoke up, “I say God is caucasian because I am caucasian!”
Ahhh…. I smiled. 🙂 She didn’t realize she had summed up the lesson for the evening. Recognizing God within us – and each other.
Despite the many times I had to say “Shhhh”, or “Please sit down.” Or “You, move over to this table by yourself, and you over to that table, and you sit down…” at the end of the evening I asked what it was they learned and from the quietest kid in class I heard, “Seeing God isn’t about what he looks like, it is about who we are on our own. It is about our relationship with him and we are going to each have a different relationship because we are all different. But we should all see God in each other.”
He got a double five! 🙂
When I offered to sub for this 6th grade CCE class I had no idea the short time I would spend with this super hyped up group would be draw me back to the joy I had in being a youth minister. I love ministering to youth. I love ministering to adults too but it is a different type of ministry. When ministering to teens you are basically planting in new soil. My very own 5th grader who went with me summed it up best on our ride home last night, Seth said, “Mom even though they were being loud and crazy I could tell they wanted to know who God was. I don’t know how to explain it,” he said.
I knew what he was talking about (and of course I am partial to my son and I do believe he has some of the same ‘gifts’ as I do…he was ‘feeling’ their longing) but he was right on the mark. They were like little flower buds wanting badly to know more and to know Him…especially when I asked them to come up with a gift God had given them and if they couldn’t I would help them out. When I began to point out their ability to be generous, kind, patient, loving, etc along with their input of sports, music, dance, etc many walked away from me saying, “I had never had anyone tell me that before.”
You see with adults we have lived through years of our ‘soil’ being watered, then dried up, and sometimes even parched and broken up so when ministering to adults the ground is harder at first, until eventually it lets the water soak in. In many ways we need to all take some time and find a way to volunteer in ministering to youth because it will help you to reclaim the fertile soil in which your faith has been planted.
What would you say God looks like?
Blessings
Shannon