Like so many others, this post has probably been a long time in coming… and it could very likely get me into trouble, as many of my opinions are apt to do…
Last week I ran into an interesting situation while working the registration table for Friday Nite Fire. It was not unique, by any means… but interesting, nonetheless…
We had quite a few new students, and one of them struck me as particularly well mannered, interactive, and inquisitive. He spent a reasonably long amount of time chatting with me at registration and stopping back by the table throughout the night. He played a little bit with Miah, who was with me, and seemed to genuinely like babies. And it was not lost on me that he was dressed in girls’ clothing…
At some point during the night, another new student came and told me that she needed to go talk to someone at another popular youth hangout and that she would be back. We have a policy that you cannot re-enter the building after you sign out, so I let her know about this and she seemed rather distraught. She went on to tell me that the other organization had kicked her friend out earlier in the evening because he is gay and that she wanted to talk to someone about it, because it wasn’t right.
And now I had to choose my words very carefully…
I told her that I agreed with her that it is not right to kick someone out just because they are gay. I am nearly certain that this statement would have caused people to stop in their tracks if anyone else had been around. Thankfully, no one was… and here I am sharing this on the world wide web a week later…
I also told her that I still couldn’t let her check out and then back in again, and in the end, she and her friends decided to stay…
All along, I was smart enough to put two and two together and come to the conclusion that the new student I mentioned earlier was the kid who got kicked out…
Well… I didn’t really think a whole lot more about it until after our event was over and I got a phone call… on my cell… from someone at the other youth hangout. How this person got my personal cell number is a bit of a mystery to me, because not that many people have it, but I have got to assume that one of “my kids” (not my biological children, mind you, who were long since sawing logs, but one of my teenage kids) must have made his or her way over there after we closed and decided to make my digits public knowledge… (who knows what else they said)…
At any rate, there was a message on my phone saying that they couldn’t find a teenager who was supposed to be there, and wouldn’t you know it, I immediately recognized the name as yet another one of the new kids we’d had… and he was a foreign exchange student… so I figured I’d probably better call back and make sure we found him!
Once I got in touch with the person who called me, it was quickly discovered that the missing teenager had been found (I’m thinking he was probably missing for less than 10 minutes), and I was going to say, “Have a good night!” and then head on home… but wait… There was something else that they wanted to, “make me aware of”…
I took a deep breath… and I knew what was coming…
They let me know that earlier in the evening they had kicked a “young man” out because he was hitting on other young men. And they gave me his name. And of course, it was my new friend...
And now I had to choose my words very carefully… again…
So I simply said, “Oh… thank you for letting me know…” I mean… seriously… what else was I supposed to say? But I just felt like they didn’t think that was a strong enough reaction…
Now here I feel like I need to stop and say this. Over the years I have kicked guys out for hitting on girls and making them feel uncomfortable… or too comfortable… In the same way, I would not hesitate to kick a guy out for hitting on a guy… or a girl for hitting on a guy… or a girl for hitting on a girl… or whatever, if other kids are being negatively affected by it. Since I was not there at the other establishment, I cannot say, for sure, what happened. He may very well have come in and hit on guys and made them feel uncomfortable and been warned to stop and kept doing it and then been kicked out. If that’s what happened, then fine. But that’s not the behavior I observed from this student once he got to our building.
Basically, I thought this was going to be the end of the story.
Except my cell rang a few minutes ago… and since I didn’t recognize the number, I didn’t pick it up.
But there was a message.
It was from the same person who called me last week, just wanting to make sure that it had been clear to me that when they said the kid was “hitting on” someone, they weren’t talking about him actually hitting another student but engaging in sexual misconduct. Apparently there had been some sort of miscommunication about this? I’m thinking that maybe since we’re not open tonight a bunch of my kids showed up there and said that I thought their policies sucked or something… and by the way, I never did say that…
But… What exactly am I supposed to say?
Am I supposed to be like, “Oh my… thanks for clearing that up, because you know… I’m a moron, and I thought you meant he started a fist fight! We’ll make sure to lock the doors from now on whenever we see him coming”? (Yes, I’m sure that’s what Jesus would have done, right? – Please read the sarcasm here)…
Look… HE’S A KID! I am not… in any way… endorsing homosexuality with this post. But if I start kicking out every kid that comes through our doors who doesn’t fit into my exact mold of what the “perfect” person should be like, there won’t be any kids left! Heck… I won’t be left, either!
And so we walk a very fine line…
It is our responsibility to these kids to show them the love of Christ and to show them what it really looks like to follow Christ. It is our responsibility to teach… but it is not our responsibility to convict (that belongs to Holy Spirit) or to judge (that belongs to God). I often fear that we have no idea where our place is.
Lisa
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