This past week I was around a sixth grader named Thomas. As we were hanging out, Thomas gave me a serious look and said there was something he didn't understand. Thinking that Thomas was about to open up and allow me the opportunity to pour guidance into his young inexperienced soul, I asked "What?". Suddenly Thomas' face changed from serious to silly and in a high pitched almost winy voice he sang out "YOU'VE GOT FIVE MINUTES TO GET RID OF THAT WORD". Immediately I realized what had happened. Instead of allowing me the chance to teach one of the great truths of the universe, Thomas had tricked me with one of the great preteen games of the universe. A game that I myself played on unsuspecting victims when I was a preteen. The "WHAT" game!
By saying the word "what", I had so carelessly stumbled into Thomas' mastery of the game. Because of my foolishness I now had the task of getting someone else to say "what" before five minutes was up. Try as I did, there was no way of getting Thomas to say the word, so I automatically moved to the easiest target I could think of: my wife!
Later that day I thought about how true to preteen ministry that experience was. As quickly as opportunities to reach preteens come they can disappear. The question then becomes; "in the small amount of time I actually had their attention, did what I say even get through???" And to me that's the true mind game!
Patrick Snow
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Preteens Are Playing Games With My mind!
Posted by SuperStart456 at 8:06 AM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
Cool blog. I don't know if you recall, but we met recently at the CPC in San Diego. We're kicking off Super Start at our church this weekend, and like you said in this post: I just hope a little bit of what's important gets through in that short time that we have on Sunday mornings. I'm really looking forward to leveraging Super Start to help with that, though.
Post a Comment