Ever have one of those days when you ask yourself, "why do I do youth ministry?" In my case, it wasn't so having the teens tie up my husband and poke him with sticks, as it was having a lesson that bombed like a McRib Buffet at a vegetarian convention.

The lesson was on marriage and the audience was inner-city teens.

Let me rewind a bit. One of the teens in our She-Wise program (which is one part Bible study and "Martha Stewart in the hood" in Chicago's Cabrini Green Housing Projects) made a comment on how she wanted to trap her boyfriend with a baby. Tamika was the ripe old age of 14. Having a baby would turn her 30-year-old mom into a grandmother and her 45-year-old mother into a great-gram, all three generations single.

The lesson would be powerful leaving these girls drooling over the notion of registering at Bloomies. I wanted to bring in picture of bridal magazines featuring women of color. However, after searching through countless magazine racks, I soon discovered those magazines didn't exist! The only wedding pictures I came up with were my own.

Instead of being impressed with seeing their youth leader in peach silk instead of sweats, the girls rolled their eyes and stated, "Marriage is lame. You all end up on Divorce Court."

That's when it hit me like rice in the face. While all these young ladies been to funerals, none had been to a wedding. Being a single teen mom was the norm in their community so my well-meaning lesson on marriage came across as the white thing instead of the right thing. All in all, I felt as if I did the dumb thing.

That's when my husband reminded me to put my Jesus Goggles on. Instead of focusing on my bombed lesson, I looked at things from God's point of view. I saw how youth ministry is not so much about the lessons as it was about just loving teens and letting God do the ministering, as in I Corinthians 15:58: Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.

Who knows. Maybe the person God really wanted to touch with the lesson that night was me.

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