The middle ground
By Sam Van Eman
It was a chilly winter morning in
I had worn it a few times before and did end up donning the horrendous piece again that day, with its wrap-around collar that started below my sternum; with its silver tassel-like zippers leading to nowhere useful; and with its white-cord borders on the neckline and sleeve ends. But it was the last time, because I had come to a moment when the shirt was more than just a shirt. Now it had meaning and I realized how much life blood there was to forfeit by wearing it.
Who am I?
What teen doesn’t want to fit in? Even those who go against the crowd do so with other like-minded rebels. Sometimes fitting in means cigarettes, or just a shirt, but every teen does or says or wants to wear something to fulfill the need for acceptance.
To be accepted is to be loved, and whether the peers who do the accepting provide true love or just an apparition of love, it feels the same to the one seeking it. Peer pressure is significant because it forces the seeker—the shirt-wearer like me, for example—to ask very deep identity questions: Who am I? What is my value in this group? Does my value change depending on how I dress or behave? If so, how much value fluctuation am I willing to tolerate? If 10 is ideal on the fitting in scale, can I tolerate an eight, a seven or even a two, as was the case with my own closet nightmare?
It doesn’t take long for any teen to figure out not only a personal tolerance level but also how to stay within its parameters. This is vital teen survival knowledge because staying within the parameters is “safe.” Wearing my shirt (a two) was not safe for me, but wearing an acceptable shirt (rating eight, nine or 10) would have been. Of course, there is another safe place, and it is one we hope all teens find. It is the place where they know who and whose they are as children of God.
In the next few paragraphs, I want to consider the pros and cons of these two places. We can’t assume it’s an easy thing to walk away from peer pressure, nor that identity in Christ is simple to acquire. Therefore, we should consider how to help teens navigate from one “safe” place to the other without simply telling them stuff like, “Don’t follow the crowd” or “Jesus loves you.”
Pros and cons
To help this discussion, I’ll refer to the safe place offered in the teen world as the SimGospel. The SimGospel is the Simulated Gospel or a simulation of the truths found in Scripture. The Gospel states that we are created in the image of God and loved with an immense, abounding love that provides security and identity. The SimGospel mocks these by stating that love comes by wearing the right shirt, or, at least, not wearing the wrong shirt.
The two charts below show the pros and cons of the SimGospel and the Gospel. Notice their indirect correlations.
Consider these lists as they relate to my 7th grade life: I had been a Christian for years. I was active in youth group and sincere with my faith in Jesus. I even told my friends about Him when the timing was right. I knew God loved me, but that was difficult to remember once I stepped onto the school bus. In fact, my shirt raised so big a value question that the Gospel was nearly impossible to believe that day.
Idols are everywhere, replacing the genuine items we’re supposed to value most. The Gospel is real and satisfying in the long run, but the Great Lover of the universe is no match for the easy to get, fast-acting and predictable SimGospel on a school morning gone awry.
You want me to do what?!
The problem is that we can’t think of buying into the Gospel as we think of buying an iPod. It is not a consumer good with immediate and tangible benefits. Yet what I wanted that morning, as a kid who admired faithfulness, was a God who provided high self-esteem and friends who loved me unconditionally. And I wanted those things right then.
For some, it takes a lifetime to believe that the Gospel’s offers are more valuable than the idols that simulate them. As youth leaders and parents, we wish our teens didn’t feel the need to hide behind make-up. We wish teens that rip on weaker kids and secretly feel awful about it would have the courage to do the right thing. We see kids following the pack with every new trend, or publicizing their best sides in order to mask the teased ones, and we wish they all knew they were loved with the deep love of Jesus. But the Gospel, as we know, is difficult, and therefore inadequate according to the teenage mind. To them, core value questions require immediate answers. There are only so many minutes before the bus arrives, and Jesus isn’t that fast.
Oh, He does show up, but not with the product benefits hoped for. Rather, He walks up to them and says, “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” In retrospect, I hear Him trying to enter our trailer battle that morning to counter the SimGospel. He says, “Sam, I know you feel insecure and want to be accepted at school, but you are putting stock in what shirt to wear. Not all the cool shirts in the world will get what your heart really wants. Deny yourself this cheap route. Doing so may feel great, or you may come home feeling as lonely as you went. No matter. Your task is to deny the idols that keep you from what you’ll one day discover to be true love.”
The middle ground
These are tough words. They challenge us to enter a risky middle ground. You see, on the one hand, there is the superficial safety of the SimGospel. On the other is the truly safe Gospel. One is easy and predictable; the other difficult and unpredictable. In between is a transition space, a middle ground everyone goes through when leaving the SimGospel. It is the space (measured in time) when the Gospel seems like the right thing before there’s been enough experience to know for sure.
For example, a teen may smoke to find love. Her Aunt Sally tells her about Christ. The teen moves into the middle ground when she says no to smoking before Christ’s love has been really tested. This is risky to her as she may be rejected by her peers before knowing, truly, that Christ’s love is dependable. In the middle ground, teens feel neither superficially safe, nor truly safe. They are neither band-wagon posers (crowd-followers), nor self-actualized individuals. In this space they are outside of both shelters, so to speak. Some do well here, and some never make it, like the following.
A kid goes to a youth retreat and has a significant spiritual experience. He confesses his bad behaviors and pledges to lead a new life of Bible reading and church-going. Weeks later, you’d never know he went. The problem was that his very real experience could not seem to help him when the girls begged him to the next wild party. He can’t dismiss his time with Christ as a non-event, but the girls’ love was more tangible than God’s in the moment. The middle ground was too risky for him.
Or consider the teen who returns from a mission trip excited about starting an extracurricular club, but then fizzles out due to hype without hope. And what about the scores of youth group seniors who give up on the best of intentions once they hit the college campus?
You can call it back-sliding, shallow faith, weak sauce or fragile roots. Maybe it’s a bit of all of these. Many kids pull through and grow substantially in faith, but given the difficulty of believing fully in the Gospel and the insecurity of the middle ground, the SimGospel is a candy-licious constant for those who don’t feel secure. The pressure from peers is ever-present, which makes the SimGospel ever-luring because teens are ever-hungry to be loved. As I said earlier, we can’t assume the confines of peer pressure to be an easy thing to leave, nor freedom in Christ something easy to acquire.
Practical guidance
As a wilderness guide, I’ve led many first-timers on multi-day backpacking trips. My basic job description is simple: Help new hikers adapt to a new environment so they can do it themselves and teach others. If I told them to cook in the woods and weather storms and navigate challenging terrain without showing them how, a few would do fine but many would get frustrated and wish to go home … where everything is familiar and easy and predictable.
Jesus says, “Deny yourself,” but what does that mean? Well, it means to stop what you’re doing. Interestingly, the process of stopping is something like discipleship. It was the disciples Jesus commanded to deny. They were the ones he wanted to help grasp the Gospel, and through plentiful and difficult experiences he did that, just as I try to do in the woods. Maybe I’m saying that we dare not call a kid away from the SimGospel if we aren’t prepared to accompany her to the Gospel. Maybe we shouldn’t ask a teen to give up his idols—his “safe” places—until we’re willing to walk with him through the middle ground to the truly safe place.
Conclusion
Jesus’ challenge is to turn away from a tangible “shelter” toward something that is not immediately, or at least, not perceivably, available. He asks for the denial of what teens may consider the only balm for a particular wound, like giving up smoking as a balm for loneliness, or letting go of rating scales for shirts. And he does so without a timetable for when the pain will truly disappear.
This is why the Gospel is so difficult, and yet so important. It is our inadequacies and hurts that make us dependent, and our dependence that pushes us toward solutions. The task of guides, therefore, is to co-labor with the Holy Spirit to help others find the genuine solution.
Maybe that’s what my mom was trying to do that terrible morning. She saw something I couldn’t see and pushed me toward it. She knew Jesus’ words were difficult, but more loving than any solution I wanted. (Just don’t tell her I said that. I don’t want her to think she won the bat war.)
Sam Van Eman was a public school teacher before joining the Coalition for Christian Outreach in 1998. As a staff specialist with the CCO, he speaks publicly about pop culture advertising and has written a book called On Earth as It is in Advertising? Moving From Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope. You can find him at HighCallingBlogs.com or at his own blog, New Breed of Advertisers. Sam enjoys partnering with his wife to raise two daughters in a media-saturated world.
For more information on resources to help you understand today’s rapidly changing youth culture, contact the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding.
©2007, The Center for Parent/Youth Understanding