This blog is a series to map out an urban youth workers’ spiritual growth experienced working with urban youth.
Compassion, emphathy, solidarity are graces initiated by God to take us to the poor taking us closer to Jesus.
One summer outreach in Los Angeles’ skid row, we have about 30 kids reaching out to the homeless. The kids made peanut butter and jelly sandwich, salami sandwich, chips, a drink and a cookie to share with a homeless person. We have them write something on the brown bag to personalize each sandwich bag. Kids wrote Jesus loves you, God bless, John 3:16 verse and drew happy faces, to name a few of their personalized message for each person they are about to meet. To prepare our team to our one hour event, we talked about things we have in common with the homeless to help them be human with fellow humans.
I recalled a Spring break backpacking trip that showed how my spiritual life is the lens that I wear to see the disadvantaged youth I care for. One of our teenagers on the trip, living on the skid row, had a bad case of skin rashes due to poor hygiene. I noticed how sensitive I was to him, I wanted to care for him more than the suburban teenager also on our team.
As I have evolved over the last seven years from working directly with children, teenagers and family to working with youth workers, I am now more about the spiritual life of youth workers and the care of their soul- the vitality needed to be in the urban mission frontier.
Most urban youth workers I listened to were drawn to disadvantaged youth through compassion. Whether they’ve heard about the urban youth angst and plights in college, seminary, experienced it during summer outreach, or for some, they simply grew up in it.
Through compassion, we see a broken down, alienated and dis-enfranchised youth and romanticized how we can love them to health, wholeness and lead them to Jesus. We unknowingly put them on a pedestal disguised in compassion. We see them as victims, survivors and most vunerable to abuse and neglect. We will soon find our compassion- what we sometimes call honeymoon stage- to be fading and when it does we hope to be moving on.
To move prematurely from the way of compassion is trying to grow up too fast to quickly. At this passage, perpetual freshness and boundless energy dominates personal newsletters. Young people we touched are angels no matter what they’ve done and rightly so. We are filled with gratefulness for what we have seeing what they have. We are full of hope for them, unbridled optimism and all because of compassion. The sweet call of Jesus for us to visit the poor, imprisoned and disadvantaged youth.
