Permission to Struggle

For a couple of years now our school has been making use of the resources at Axis.org - an organisation which aims to "connect parents, teens & Jesus in a disconnected world." Their video 'conversation kits' are some of their best work. Once such video on the topic of Anxiety was used during a series of morning devotions with our secondary students.

What follows here is an excerpt from a recent Culture Translator newsletter from Axis. It refers to the same 'Anxiety' conversation kit. I wonder if any of our students had similar thoughts?

A Bible teacher recently used our Conversation Kit on Anxiety as part of a series of high school chapels. At the end, he received this message from a student: “Your anxiety chapels were great! I think it has been such a huge help to actually have meaningful chapels instead of constantly hearing God’s Word and how we should not be having any struggles. Actually hearing about anxiety, physical temptation, and pressure have been really helpful… Thanks for not acting like they don’t exist.” Although one of our goals at Axis is to awaken a love of God’s Word in teens, apparently this particular student had begun to associate scripture with pressure to pretend like everything was okay.

It’s easy to imagine how this association could develop. When “encouraging” verses like Philippians 4:8 and 1 Thessalonians 5:18 are taken out of context (and books like Job, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and ⅓ of the Psalms are never mentioned), the Bible can easily start to seem like it says, “It’s wrong to have problems,” or, “If you have problems, it’s because you don’t have enough faith, or you’re sinning.” Some of us can remember growing up and wondering if the only emotion allowed in Christianity was happiness. In the same way, what was comforting to this student about these chapels was that they gave permission to struggle.

Of course, we all struggle, whether we’re given permission or not—it’s just that our environment can either make us feel safe to admit it, or not. But as Esther Fleece put it in her book No More Faking Fine, “God meets us where we are at, not where we pretend to be."

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, a day about, among other things, cultivating gratitude. Gratitude is good; what’s also good is helping our teens see that gratefulness doesn’t mean pretending like we don’t have problems—it just means that in addition, we deliberately acknowledge what we appreciate. Help your teens see that the Bible isn’t a collection of trite platitudes and two-dimensional characters pretending like everything is always fine; it’s a story of people who knew the full spectrum of human emotion, fighting their way through life with an incredible God. As such, it’s a book that real people can relate to—maybe even see themselves in.

Scripture of the Month

December

Psalm 102:18-22