I’m sorry if I seemed reactionary. It was frustrating to read your words, especially, since I was very tired. I should have given you more grace either way. My fault, no excuses.

You know, I think there is wisdom in looking at the good in our kids. We should come along side them and lead them from this angle. We can praise them for their good and explain that comes from their identity in Christ. Ground their good works in the Gospel and build from there.

Throwing some ideas out before I’m away with my bride for the weekend!

Grace to you.
.-= Mark Lamprecht´s last blog ..My Wife, My Helper =-.

You said you have questions for me, pertaining to Youth Ministry I presume, so go ahead and e-mail me your questions and we will make it into an interview about Youth Ministry. Sound good?

I could go on and on, with specifics, but I didn’t write this post to toot a horn. I wrote it to emphasize how spotlighting youth and encouraging the ones we see doing things because of their faith, could help them (and their leaders) feel as though they are important now and that we’d see more kids living close to God and having a reason to come to church after they’ve graduated from highschool.

Anyway…you keep thinking your way, Matt. I’ll keep thinking mine. I imagine what you wrote may have “had to be said” to someone…but it didn’t flip my switch, give any hope or offer any solutions. So maybe my next post here at Voices will make a stab at that. I do have a few questions for you, but they’ll have to wait till later. I need to get to bed because I’m taking 4 granddaughters to the waterpark tomorrow. Will try and catch up later.

May God add blessings to your life and give you greater hope. I’ve found that most of my optimism comes when my mind is stayed on Him Who makes all things possible. When I call unto Him, He shows me great and mighty things which I cannot conceive. When I focus on all the failures in others, the flaws in others and the inadequacies, I notice I miss a bunch of the blessings and don’t do nearly as much encouraging to others as I could. Sorry if I didn’t say what you thought “had to be said”….uh, no I’m not. I think I said what needed to be said in my post. selahV
.-= selahV´s last blog ..IS FAMILY HARMONY POSSIBLE? =-.

Wondered why you’d written me twice and felt obligated to say what you said. Now I know. It wasn’t you at all who said it.

I apologize for being blind and causing you any undue stress for “impugning” you.

As far as my comment that you quoted, I was trying to reemphasize what I wrote in my post above: “I didn’t write about them [the youth in my church] because they are the only kids in the world doing something good. I wrote about them because very often, just like in other generations, all you ever hear about teenagers is negative stuff. And I wonder if we took time to spotlight the better, more positive things we see them doing, if more kids would be like “these” kids.”

And, Mark, if we looked more at what kids did that was good (even though we do see their flaws), and emphasized it more often, then maybe we see more and more of the good.

I hope this helps. If not, then I will try a bit harder. As far as sharing anymore “special revelations” about you…I will say, from what I can tell, you are longsuffering and patient with elderly ladies. How’s that? selahV
.-= selahV´s last blog ..IS FAMILY HARMONY POSSIBLE? =-.

I do think that comment was directed to me… Sorry if you are offended by the pessimism, but growing up in the youth “ministry” I did and seeing the tragic results and statistics of what we call youth “ministry” today it leads one to be pessimistic. There are a lot of things to be optimistic about, the state of youth “ministry” in America is not one of them.

I am not saying that there arent some great Christ following students out there… What I am saying is that they are by no means the norm and that is largely due to the reasons I stated earlier.