Faces of Love

Frontier Ranch. Colorado. [Click to enlarge]

I got this from an old Young Life acquaintance's Facebook photos.  It's a staff bonfire at Frontier Ranch in Colorado.  To me it captures something of the undeniable magic of Young Life camps.  My favorite memories of Young Life camps as a leader: The moments when all the staff cheers for the teenagers as they unload off the buses.  It's not like a regular cheer, or a distracted obligatory cheer.  It's like a super-focused, completely genuine THERE IS NOWHERE I'D RATHER BE THAN STANDING HERE ADORING YOU AND TAKING YOU IN--LOOK AT YOU!--YOU ARE QUITE A HUMAN BEING TO BEHOLD AND I CHERISH THE SIGHT OF YOU!  I loved it because the beheld ones would lose their breath for a second before struggling to recover their defenses: "Are y'all, like, weird or something?"  I loved it because in those moments I saw the faces of girls I loved soaking in a level of no-strings-attached delight that I suspected they had never quite experienced like that, and in this I knew there was a little bit of healing going on inside.

Now I suppose I'm down to plugging Young Life, but truly I think this is an example of how YL communicates the gospel through the WAY they approach teenagers more so than fixating on conversion as defined by sinner's prayer experiences.  What is that 'way'?  In a word: delight.  To use a gross generalization, but true for my own life at least, to me the delight and play offered to kids in YL speaks far more hope than the guilt-inducing, sin-management-focused sermons many youth group kids ingest at church each week.   In youth group (and across the board in the tradition I grew up in) I heard hope and yet felt perpetually never-good-enough-for-God, and other forms of mass anxiety.  In YL I heard hope and felt delighted in.  God's face of delight was one which I had known very little of til then.  The church teaching I had known seemed to focus on what-was-not (not right in my heart/life/behavior/devotion); YL tended to delight in what-was (that is, my human glory, as bearer of the imago Dei).  They are two very different axises of ministry.  Yes, I'm oversimplifying it and no, I do not idealize YL.  But I like that part for sure.  The delight part.

While we're at it, this was not an intentional lead-in but my brother and sister-in-law Adam & Cara are about to be property staff interns at Washington Family Ranch, a YL camp in Oregon, for a year!!!!  That's a big deal and I'm super proud of them!!  And if they have to raise support, everyone who reads this should give them huge amounts of money.