Youth Minister’s Tip: Creat some Ebenezer’s

July 26, 2009

This fall will mark the beginning of my unlucky number 13th year in full time ministry.  Early on in my ministry, I was deeply blessed to have had a mentor who had been involved in youth ministry for 40 years.  (My first gig was as a Young Life church partner in south Georgia.)  One of the things that my mentor taught me was to save and mark the important moments in your career.  He taught me about the idea of having some ebenezers, which comes from a passage in 1 Samuel 7, where Israel marks a spot and calls it Ebenezer, which means “Thus far has the LORD helped us.”

So I have a couple things that serve as ebenezers for me.

The first one is a file of every encouraging letter or note I have ever gotten.  It is an amazing thing to pull out and read when I have doubts about what I am doing and if God is using me.  I have never made it all the way through the file without deeply tearing up.  Included in it are two scrapbooks, one from each of my first two churches.

The second is what I call my Ebenezer wall.  Recently I had to move offices and one of the first things I did was to set-up the Ebenezer wall.  It is full of pictures from events, of people that have meant a lot of me and, again, it is hard to look at without reminding me of God’s grace and goodness.  (And let me make an unashamed plug for 3M’s picture hanging strips, which are amazing and can be removed without damaging walls.)

And lastly is a new one.  In making the office move, it allowed me to hang a couple things that are super special that my mom has made for me.  If you do youth ministry for as long as I have, you have some youth shirts.  Add in my pack rat nature from being a kid and that I have worked the speaker circuit and I have a LOT of t-shirts.  My mom took some a few years ago and made me a sweet quilt of them.  The last set, it just so worked out that mom was wrapping up around the time of the move and so I turned them into wall hangings.  There are a ton of memories that hang there, again, being an ebenezer for me. (The picture at the top of the post is of that wall right now.)

So, if you want to last in ministry, you need some of those reminders of how good God has been.  So be thinking about ways to mark your life with some ebenezers.  (My last was painting some ceramic picture frames with this summer’s interns, which we can pick up and fill with a picture of us all this week.)

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