Checking our pulse
By Steven Polley
Director, Youth Ministry and Adult Education
Imagine for a moment the little Girl Scout coming to you, wanting you to buy cookies. Or how many of us have experienced the young adult, just trying to get started, knocking on our door, wanting to sell us a new vacuum sweeper? Or better yet, how many of us can think back over the years and remember the times that we were selling something for a reason? For myself, it was selling magazine subscriptions for some gift. I wonder how many subscriptions I sold to people who really didn’t need another magazine, but did it just to be nice. How many of us have actually bought that vacuum because we wanted to help that young person out? Now the Girl Scout cookies, on the other hand, are a different story; they are good.
Here we are back into another school year, and of course, one of the elements that is part of any school curriculum is fund raising. Before long we are going to have kids knocking at our doors wanting us to purchase something.
I want to extend to you an invitation, regarding something along this line. I want you without hesitation to say "yes," and have your children say "yes" as well to an invitation from the Diocesan Youth Council, a small group of young men and women representing your parish and the diocese. These kids make major sacrifices with one thing in mind — to help other youth from around the diocese experience youth ministry and a deeper relationship with God in new and special ways — much in the same way as they have over the years.
Recently, the Youth Council gathered for a leadership weekend. During this time together, I proposed to them three words that have been bouncing around in my ministry for about a year. These three words are, "active," "alive" and "mature." To me, "active" is the word that makes us ask the question, "Why do we exist"? We ask the question "why," and from this we establish a clearer sense of purpose. "Alive" means just this, that we take time to check our pulse, to check our blood pressure, and ask the question, "Why are we doing what we are doing?" And then of course, being mature brings it all together. We become ministers completely, head, heart and spirit.
When I spoke to the Youth Council regarding this, one of their deepest desires was to increase the number of young people participating in our diocesan events. We normally have a little over 100 youth attend the junior high and senior high rallies each year. The goal of the Youth Council for this year is to more than double that number. One of the reasons they desire this is when we talked about being alive, they responded in a way that let you know that participation in these events makes them feel more alive, and they simply want all of the youth of southwest Kansas to have these same feelings. They realized that we do, however, need to check our blood pressure and do some things to make it stronger. This gave them a clearer sense of purpose.
Thus, I invite you to examine in your own mind the pulse and blood pressure of your parish youth minister. Then, I invite you to respond "yes" to the knock on your door, or in your parish when these young men and women of the Youth Council extend their hands of invitation for your kids and the other youth of the parish to attend our rallies. (See page 13 for a registration form on the Junior High Rally.)
Events such as these rallies have helped form the youth on the Council into the young men and women that they are today. Won’t you allow them then, to walk the journey with your kids?