Well, last year was a bit of a wash-out for me, spending most of the time in hospital and recovery & not a good year for Polly either as she was forced into coping with my ‘pending death’ a few too many times… Just as I thought this year was finally getting its act together, we get another side swipe from a viral pandemic!
Who would have thought picking this domain name would be so apt! Originally I picked this name with the thoughts of having a ‘spoof’ site where youth workers could share their antics, but that never seemed to take off. So I re-purposed it to try and keep people up to date with the work God called Polly and I to do, but that never seemed to get the time needed to take off either… Now we are in a state where we are youth workers and we do not have a group of youth we can work with…
Well, that’s a lie! The young people are still there, still here, still struggling with growing up in a world which seems alien at times; far more so at the moment! They are used to social media, texting all the time, being on their mobile devices… but there was always the expectation they would be safe and able to use those devices in public. Not so now! The world may be struggling with this in terms of trying to survive, but our young people have grown up with being able to ‘do’ social media and then meet up to laugh and cry about what they have shared. Take out that important meeting factor and we have a mini crisis in the making. Instead of using social media as a staging post to meeting publicly, they now only have this medium as a ‘life mode’.
I saw a post from one of our favourite leaders today talking about reaching out to people in need, people on the streets and giving them a safe place to be… I want to raise the profile of the need for our young people here in the UK. They are going to be excluded from school as of the end of the day today and that means their primary means of public contact is going to be removed from their lives. I’m not suggesting we get large groups of young people together – that is just wrong in this time of our global crisis, but we can encourage them to do a little bit more of ‘getting to use other means of communication.’
I had no problems with allowing our young people to use heir phones during services and during meetings because it allowed them to tell other people of the place they were in at that moment – but now all they have is a very inward focused device which may well make them feel more trapped and more in need of physical contact.
There are plenty of apps out there where they can gather as on-line groups and share their experiences in real-time. It is this real-time contact they crave and need; especially in these times! Encourage your young people to meet up on-line, not in a one-on-one mode but a one-to-many group mode where they can encourage each other to feel safer and more together! Let’s use the internet to break the walls down and allow our young people to continue expressing themselves with open hearts. I know some will try and hide behind the digital walls, but being in a group mode will give them some sense of comfort and well-being.
Love you guys – God bless
DJ