I recently had an opportunity to go on a service retreat with a group of ninth grade students. The main purpose of the retreat was to talk about servant leadership and what that looks like in high school while giving them the opportunity to spend some time sprucing up a camp for people with disabilities.
At dinner the first evening, after our prayer, all the teens got up to get food. One of the ninth grade boys stopped the rest of them and said, “No, ladies first.”
And they listened. They stopped moving toward the food and waited until the girls had their plates. For the remainder of our time at camp, the girls were always the first to eat.
After every meal, the chaperones had barely stopped eating before the first group of students came over to ask if they could start washing the dishes. I am not making this up. They quickly got to work washing dishes while other students grabbed brooms and swept around the tables.
The seniors who came to serve as retreat counselors had personally handwritten notes for every ninth grader. We would not have known about them had we not seen the seniors working on them. They weren’t asked to do that. It was their idea, and they chose to do it.
Teenagers are some of my favorite people on the planet. They notice one another. They serve without being asked. They act generously. And they are capable of more than we often realize.
They will also take more risks. Which is why the ninth grader on the retreat did not get to run the chainsaw or use the ax to cut up the tree.
Maybe teenagers don’t need us to spend quite so much time watching for what they’re doing wrong. Maybe we need to pay closer attention to what they are already doing right.
I am blessed to spend my days with teenagers like these—kids who, whether they know it or not, are already living out 1 Timothy 4:12:
“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.”