All before I was 18...

"Our friday night, no strings attached, events. No strings attached means we're not preaching, we're not going to do cool stuff only to make you sit through a cheesey 10 minute epilogue at the end. We've got rid of all of that and cut it back to just the cool stuff. - a local Church in Spokane

I read this statement today on a church website, I was looking for some info on some resources I knew they were providing for the practical needs of the poor in our community. In the process, I read this on the "youth" site. It's a ministry philosophy like this that breaks my heart as a former youth pastor. It's youth ministry like this that makes me fall on my face and pray to God for a movement of grace and power among the youth of our city. A harvest gathered through gospel preaching laborers, not just game guru's. I understand all the arguments and tag lines that are offered up in these kind of discussions but in the end...I think about the many young people I have seen in the streets, the jails, the schools and the churches that need more than sanctified goofiness in the their lives.

I simply have no understanding of that world as a teenager. I remember what it felt like to put a razor blade to my wrist and contemplate cutting into my flesh and pouring out my numb life, after a night of frying hard on LSD. I remember the lostness, the emptiness that consumed my soul and the helplessness that I felt as I realized that no amount of partying or getting laid was ever going to fill the ache inside.

The smell of puke, urine and dirty clothes from nights of sleepless partying is familiar to me. The cold of sleeping in a dumpster and having to try to start a fire to keep warm. Running from police, getting a gun drawn on you and feeling handcuffs clip over your wrist or the hard plastic of the backseat of a cop car. The fear, the anger and the blood of fist fights, watching someone get pummeled and not letting them run from their antagonizer, all for the fun of watching it. I can still see the tears of girls being rejected after being used and watching them realize they are just a moment, a sexual experience, an appetizer.

I've meet drug pushers, with their sexual conquests pictured in Polaroid's on the wall...liars, abusers, evil people that prey off the addicted or the naive. I know what is like to not graduate, to fail, to be a loser. I've sat in circles, watched blood being leeched from an offered hand over a religious symbol, while music played that hailed Satan, mocked Christ...I've seen frightening devils.

I've found a suicide attempt, wrists slit, naked, bloodied and floating nude in a bath tube. I've watched some one shove a needle into their arm and beg for more and more and more and realized that they would kill themselves for that high. I've felt drugs squeeze out your breath, I've gasped and lost consciousness....thinking that I was dying from a drug overdose. I know what it's like to stumble into a hospital and ask for help because I can't breathe.

I saw all this before I was 18.

Where are the youth ministries for those kind of kids?

"While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight; while little children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight - I'll fight to the very end!"-William Booth