Autumn, Sleep, and Teens

Lazy F Camp, 2012.

QUEEN ANNE, Seattle

          From the stone wall on 7th Avenue West this crisp, blue-sky morning, you can see the Bainbridge Island ferry clear across the Sound as it emerges from the harbor, bound for downtown Seattle, and the streets are filled with the orange of a well-painted fall season.  It’s a helpful reminder of why we’re in ministry.

            “Life,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, as our colleague Kristen reminded us last week, “starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  No doubt.  For us at Lazy F, the awesome and extremely fun process of planning for summer 2014 began in August before the 2013 staff even left, and the busyness of our campers’ lives started afresh as the leaves began to turn.

            And they are busy, our campers: youth ministry has known this for a long time.  Here in Seattle, as around the country, teens are bustling with college-level courses, starting their marathon of preparation for the AP exams in the spring.  Surely it’s applaudable: see Proverbs 8 about the virtue of the acquisition of knowledge.  But nowadays, it’s coming at a cost.

            “My kids would be part of the life of the church,” a parent at a church on Seattle’s Eastside told me yesterday, “if it weren’t for the bajillion things that are taking energy out of their lives already.  They’re exhausted.”

            They’re not alone.  A few weeks ago, a Maryland school district proposed delaying the daily high school start-time to 8:15 a.m., fifty minutes later than they currently start, in an effort to secure more sleep for teens (albeit at the cost of moving the middle schools back to 7:45).  Queen Anne teens, who attend Ballard High, start first period at 7:50 a.m.  Across the pond in Bothell, it’s a half-hour earlier, and “zero period” begins as early as 6:20.

            Much of our pattern of early-morning school-starts is an accident of circumstance: parents do need to get to work, and buses do need to serve multiple schools.  But in a culture that prizes intense homework, college-level classes in the high school years (again, a good thing), and leadership in extracurriculars, teen-life often pays the difference in sleep and downtime.

            Maybe there’s a divine message for us in autumn, when the vegetation goes through its cycle of resigning to the need for rest, quiet, and rejuvenation in preparation for the life-filled explosion of spring and summer.  Summertime “dies” into autumn, which yields the “resurrection” of spring, as Our Lord told us: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies," Jesus said, "it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24 niv).

The universe is an artwork, and the Artist, the triune God who made it, appears to think that rest and refreshment are so important that they’re designed into the very fabric of the world we move through at this time every year.  Too bad, then, that this is the time at which we ask our youth to become more busy.  Isn’t that backwards?

            The ministry need couldn’t be clearer.  If God wants us to rest, and if we’re driving our teens to exhaustion, then maybe the church has a call to balance its ministries of activity and creative bustle for kids (please, let's not do away with broomball and skiing!) with countervailing opportunities to learn the Christian disciplines of quiet, stopping for a moment, sleep—giving them the chance to just “be”, to bask in our Lord’s prevenient grace for them just as they are.

            In camping and youth ministry, at Lazy F and elsewhere, let’s take a cue from this delicious, Christ-designed season of leaves, Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and knit beanies, and ask how we can embrace Jesus’ call to stillness, peace, grace—and ask the Holy Spirit to infuse our ministry design with a dose of the rest that our kids long for.

            John Harrell

            Program Coordinator

Lazy F Camp, 2012

1.  How does your routine encourage stillness and quiet in the Lord’s presence?

2.  Who are the teens in your life?  Ask them how they feel from day to day.  How do they feel about their level of rest?

3.  How does your church invite teens to experience God’s prevenient grace through stillness and peace?  How can you lead by example to help the teens in your life experience God’s peace this autumn?