One of the toughest jobs in a church is the youth group leader.
Pastors only have to deliver the sermon once a week, visit a couple shut-ins, and survive the live-action Call of Duty: Modern Warfare roleplay with the board of elders (often with real ammo). The secretary just has to answer the phone, let visitors into the church so she can discourage them properly by staring at them from behind her desk, and eat lunch every day. The elders just need to sit around being right.
But youth group leaders? They actually have to work.
Youth group leaders have the unenviable task of taking a religion founded 2,000 years ago on the other side of the planet, among a people who didn’t even wear pants, and making it sound at once reasonable and exciting. They have to this for an audience — teenagers — at an age when they will be the most disaffected, ask the most mind-bogglingly basic and therefore challenging questions, tell you when they think you are wrong (most of the time) or just stupid (the rest of the time), without ever once appreciating how much work went into planning your sophisticated and deeply spiritual activity of making them burrow face-first into trays of gelatin to retrieve the keys that will unlock their handcuffs.
And somehow, amid all that, youth group leaders are supposed to engage them with questions many adults don’t have time for, like “What is my purpose in life?” and “What does it look like to be a person of integrity?” when the teens are actually thinking things like “Holy buttered Moses on a pogostick, Gwen looks hot! I wonder if I can get her to sit next to me in the church van on the way to Six Flags tonight?” and “The new collectible diecast model of the Millennium Falcon goes on sale at midnight tomorrow. How am I going to get the other $283.17 I need to buy it?”
The youth group leader at my church a few years ago knew better than to teach the kids church history; or to try to engage them with gross activities like burrowing through gelatin, especially since Patrick knew he would never successfully engage them in gross-out activities like cleaning up. Instead, he decided to engage them with mysticism.
Christian mysticism comes with a few advantages that work well for those who teach it. One is that it sounds edgy because it’s free-floating and based on popular conceits about God rather than anything actually taught in the dusty old pages of Scripture. The other is that while this gives it countercultural appeal, it doesn’t actually involve Tarot cards, Ouija boards or incantations to Chthulhu performed over a pentagram, so it usually comes with some degree of job security as the Bible never actually forbids it.
So one week, Patrick decided to teach the kids about visualization.
“I want you to imagine a person,” he told the half-dozen or so teens in his charge that evening, “and take a sheet of paper and draw them.”
The teens, or most of them at least, dutifully averted their eyes from Gwen and stopped imagining riding in the back seat of the van with her, and started visualizing these new people in the way only teenagers can. They were people fit for a freak show. Orange skin. Three eyes. No noses. Missing limbs. Extra limbs. As it was mid-October, one unfortunate wore a jack-o’-lantern on his shoulders and carried his head in his hand like a latter-day Brom Brones.
“Now we’re going to take a few minutes and quietly pray for these people.” Patrick said.
“O Lord, please reattach this man’s head before his pumpkin rots” went one prayer.
Another that ascended to heaven: “If you let me ride in the back seat with Gwen, I’ll give all my allowance to feed starving orphans for the next year.”
The prayers finished. Youth group ended. The pictures ended up in the recycling.
“What was the point of that?” asked Luke. He was one of the youngest members of the youth group.
“Didn’t you hear? Patrick said next week we’re going to Walmart to look for these people and share the gospel with them,” said Emma.
The idea went over badly at once. Even allowing for the unfortunate medical conditions the teens had visualized in their pictures, no one in the youth group had any interest in socially awkward activities like getting thrown out of Walmart on a Sunday evening for approaching complete strangers and telling them they were going to hell unless they changed their religion.
The next Sunday rolled around, and all the teens had come down with an illness, been called away at once to a dying relative’s bedside in the Dominican Republic, or otherwise were unable to attend.
All of them except Luke.
Luke’s parents were devout believers, and while they didn’t hold with all Patrick’s ideas, they believed that it would be a healthy trauma for Luke to practice sharing his faith, no matter how much he cried about not wanting to go and meet the person he had drawn.
But Luke hadn’t just drawn someone with blue hair. He’d been reading H.P. Lovecraft late at night with a flashlight under his bedcovers, and he’d drawn what he’d been reading: a great green monster with wings like a bat’s, yellow eyes like a snake’s, and a mouth with a hundred tendrils and teeth like needles.
Patrick drove Luke to Walmart, and there they met Chthulhu.
