High school is such an interesting stage of life. More responsibilities are given to each student, but they are still told that they are not adults. They want to grow up, stay young, and define themselves as individuals all at once. They want the most out of life, but they also want to feel needed and safe. These students are told that they are no longer children, but they still want to have fun.
It is into this space that we bring YoungLife. We want to give these teenagers a fun place where they can express their desires, be cared for by adults, and where they can simply belong. We build all of this in order to show each student the love of Jesus. Sometimes it looks a little wacky, like having a race between three different pizza delivery guys, but everything we do is in order to build a place for high schoolers to feel welcome, know that they are loved, and hear about the life that Jesus Christ is offering them.
In our Pizza Olympics club, we had 29 high school students, games including human musical chairs, a Pizza Delivery Champion named German, the biggest ice cream sundae you've ever seen, and a talk about who Jesus introduced himself as. All of these pieces seem separate, even disconnected, but each leader and I plan these events around the simple fact that we are building a time and place where teenagers will have the best time of their week. It's about caring for them, and introducing each and every high schooler to Jesus himself.
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