by Scott Gronholz
Director of Youth Ministries

I love a good story. I love stories presented in all different sorts of genres. Plays, books, movies, music; they all tell stories in their own unique and engaging ways. Another way I like to hear stories is around the dinner table with family or at a coffee shop with a good friend or a student. I’m pretty sure, based on my experience, that this is the same for everybody. We all like stories.

We are somehow hard-wired this way. And I think if we were to look back on our days we would find that most of our interactions with other people were spent either listening to or relaying a good story. Then, there inevitably comes a point where the natural ebb and flow of life has somehow been interrupted and you realize you are in the middle of a really good story.

This happened to me about three weekends ago when I took our Middle School Youth Group to Tall Timbers Lodge on the other side of Stevens Pass. We were scheduled to leave on a Friday and by Thursday things were well-planned and we were on our way to having a normal, fun-filled weekend.

Friday morning I woke up to reports of record-breaking snow dumping on Stevens Pass. All day I discussed with leaders and parents if they thought we should go or not. We ended up going, covered in prayer, and armed with four-wheel drive and the stubbornness that only comes from spending every Tuesday and Sunday with 50 screaming middle school students. Things went fine for the first leg of our trip, and then we hit the Pass.

Instantly we found ourselves on snow-covered roads with almost blinding amounts of new snow falling onto our windshields. Almost instantly one of our drivers needed to pull over to put on chains and was accompanied by another vehicle and mine. Not knowing that we had stopped, the rest of our convoy, two cars and two vans, pressed on. We spent about an hour and half putting on chains as snow pelted us and kids began to get impatient.

By the time we arrived at Tall Timbers it was 11:30 pm, two hours after our estimated time of arrival. We assumed the rest of the group that had gone on ahead were there waiting for us. This wasn’t the case.

About 20 minutes after we arrived, the two vans and two cars came roaring up, kids piled out, raced to me, and began to relay their story of how they passed the camp by accident and came upon a huge log blocking the road that they spent an hour trying to remove as a youth group. A “true adventure” was how one student put it.

Living in the midst of a great story was an exciting way to start the trip, to say the least, but our trip also included the telling of stories.

For our retreat we decided to have four of our leaders, including me, share their testimonies with the kids. The idea was for a leader to share their life story and then go back and highlight something that happened to them in middle school and what they learned about their faith in Christ through that experience. The response to these testimonies was thrilling.

Kids began to realize that their leaders are human and dealt with the same issues they did and could therefore help them wrestle with strong questions about their faith. And then there were those inevitable moments that happen on every trip when a leader is casually hanging out with a student and that student unexpectedly begins to share his or her story. As leaders we hear funny stories about school pranks, awkward teachers, or disastrous soccer games, but we also hear stories that reveal extreme self-doubt and deep sadness.

Our experiences at Tall Timbers ended up being a blessing to everybody who took the journey and as I look back on that time I am amazed at how God uses our stories to weave our lives together into a much larger story.

When I was in Young Life we used to say that when you’re working with teenagers it’s important to

“Earn the right to be heard.”

The idea is that after spending so much time with a teenager in a relational context, a leader has now earned the right to share their faith. It is a great concept, but over the years my emphasis has changed and I have begun to use a different phrase with my leaders when talking about ministry with students:

“Earn the right to listen.”

As leaders we can talk and talk at these students, but we truly are on holy ground when a young person trusts us enough to share intimate parts of his or her story with us.

That weekend God used a snow storm, a giant log, a few leaders’ testimonies, and some intimate conversations between leaders and students about life and faith to connect us with God’s story. Stories are shared, heard, and experienced and, through this, God reveals a little bit more about who we are in Him, who He is in the midst of our stories, and how all of our stories are small parts of the grand story of His every-pursuant love for us.