How’s Your Hyphen?

Had I ever become the prize-winning writer God intended me to be, my first book would have been called Jesus Never Went to Junior High, because he didn’t give us a clue about dealing with this unique subset of early teenagerism. At some point, however, through something akin to a God-given epiphany and thanks to my pastoral duty of preparing middle schoolers to become church members, I discovered that these really were the “wonder years” as portrayed by a 1980’s sitcom. My wife’s calling to be a gifted middle school teacher might have had some influence on this opinion.

While teaching many classes of this exciting, bewildering and questionable endeavor over the decades, I figured out that sixth-graders were the best suspects because they were still beguilable, gullible and remarkable. Their minds still curious, and their attitudes congenial, both of which would change dramatically in a few months. I chose the spring as the season because after-school root beer floats are at their finest in that time of the year. And since the first lesson involved a field trip to the local graveyard, the weather was more favorable.

Twelve-year-olds freakout because they’ve never been privy to reading tombstones. They wander around for a bit — awkward and giggling — until I gather them to sit on top of a large flat tombstone at ground level.This is the Presbyterian prelude for that come-to-Jesus-before-Jesus-comes-to-you moment. And this is where the the hyphen leaps up and declares to unsuspecting and untainted teenagers that life is limited between the date-of-birth and the date-of-death. Even though it may be cut in stone, you don’t take your life — that hyphen — for granite. It’s all you get…one hyphen each. Suddenly, God bless ’em, they get it!

Which leads to the bigger questions of the course: what will you do with your hyphen and how in the world does your faith [or lack of it] in God figure into that equation? My job was not to give them pat or slick text-book answers, but to enable them to solve their own problems. My hope in that cemetery was to haunt them into living with their questions for the rest of their hyphenated lives.

On the last day of the last class of my last year before retirement, I gathered my little flock of 10 sixth-grade girls in the church van and sensed that all was not well in Christendom. In their catty way, they were nitpicking each other with minor verbal skirmishing. Prematurely, they were beginning to turn into sour seventh-graders-to-be.

At the end of my own rope and realizing that this was all heading south in a hurry, I called a friend and fellow pastor who raised goats for Heifer International, and asked if the new kids had been born. We skipped the root beer floats and headed for the goat farm where there were enough new kids for each irritable communicant to hold one. Miraculously, the bickering yielded to smiling and laughing and civilized behavior all around. After getting them to circle up with their new-born goats, I ended the course with one last question: What does this have to do with being a member of the Church?

Rather than mess up the answer, I turned to my friend and compatriot, “Reverend Currie, what does this have to do with church?” He simply told us all about Jesus’ concern for the poor people of the earth, and these goats were predestined to be given to them through Heifer International. Standing there in a stinking circle of goat manure, the class graduated into happy disciples of the kingdom in our midst. God bless ’em!