“ 11 Teach these things and insist that everyone learn them. 12 Don’t let anyone think less of you because you are young. Be an example to all believers in what you say, in the way you live, in your love, your faith, and your purity. 13 Until I get there, focus on reading the Scriptures to the church, encouraging the believers, and teaching them.”

1 Timothy 4:11-13

I can honestly say that I have been on both sides of this passage. I have been looked down upon in my younger years because of my age, and I have written off young people from doing certain tasks because of their age.  I know, I work with youth so I’m supposed to think the best of our teens. However, sometimes the more you know about an age group the more you allow the stereotypes to influence your thinking.  For every time I have been right about a stereotype of a young person, there are countless times I have been proven wrong. Unfortunately, there have been many times when students have not been given the opportunity to prove me wrong. Even worse yet I think we as adults contribute to the stereotypes because we do not provide them with opportunities to show us what they are capable of. If you’re like me, you like things done a certain way and it’s hard for you to give up control and let someone else do a job because you worry that it may not come out as polished as you would like or there is a greater risk of failure all together.  I find that every time I get over myself and provide a student with an opportunity to show me what they are capable of I am blown away by the results.   By not giving our youth opportunities, we are handicapping them from moving forward successfully into adulthood.  I can remember as a teen working on projects with my father in the garage, and my job was always to hold the flashlight.  I hardly received instructions on what we were doing, or an explanation as why we were doing it, so now as an adult I am left to figure things out for myself because my father felt it would have taken too long to teach me to do it or that I may have made the problem worse.  Admittedly, there were many times growing up that I tried to fix something on my own and made the problem worse, but that does not mean that the desire and drive to learn and to be productive was not there, I simply lacked the knowledge.

         I deal with youth on a daily basis, and one of the things I have to constantly remind myself of is that it is far more important for me to teach and guide a young person than it is to have something done my way. I want to encourage you to find your role in developing the young people of today. The amount of youth willing to help and to be productive members of our society far outweighs the number of people willing to teach and guide them.  It may be a little more trying and time consuming on the front end, but I can tell you that when you see a student whom you care about and spent time working with succeed on their own, the rewards are far greater than the upfront cost!