Reframing Narratives (F11-17)
Happy Saturday to you!
I was raised on an allowance. I remember being in the first grade and receiving a dollar every week, a dollar that I would then break into dimes so I could tithe 10% to Sunday school. By the time we moved to Poland my brother and I got 10 złotych every week, which I would either diligently take 1z away from to put into a tithe fund or I wouldn’t spend any money for 9 weeks and would stash away the 10th allowance to take to church the next Sunday.
Most countries treat money like a single pan of pie: there is a finite amount of money in their economy, and everybody gets a certain amount of it. Some people get a lot of the pie - globally, 1% own 45% of the pie, 9% own 40% of the pie, and 90% own 15% of the pie (Wikipedia).
As a kid, that was certainly my imagination of money: I got 10z every week, and so I would save 9z a week all year long so that I could buy more LEGOs the one week we went to Legoland. Every time I had the opportunity or need to spend money on anything else, I would abstain. I didn’t want to waste it on anything less important than my LEGO collection. My parents didn’t pay me per chore or per hour; I got what I got and it never occurred to me that I could increase the size of my pie through effort of my own.
In a 4-dimensional world this pie imagery makes sense: your harvest is finite. The animal you hunt doesn’t keep increasing in volume after it dies. If you take a bigger piece of cake, there’s less left for everyone. We all have the same 24 hours in our day, 7 days in our week.
But innovators and the 1% frame these limits differently. They agree that our economy operates on pie, but you know what’s cool about pies to these guys?
You can make more of them.
Odds are good that if we’ve been friends in the past 3 years, you’ve heard me tell a story about why I left youth ministry in October of 2021.
I didn’t actually leave it all immediately, but I know it was October and I know it was 2021 because I had put together a city-wide youth night where the Lord blessed me with incredible favor so 200 kids from across 8 Casper youth groups gathered together on October 20th, worshiping with a youth band from Gillette, dancing the church clap, and sitting and listening through the entirety of two short sermons.
Despite all of that, I felt like a failure as the students left and I helped tear down the auditorium. Parents and youth leaders thanked and congratulated me for creating such a powerful experience, and I knew in the pit of my stomach that I had fabricated a moment for them, and they would wake up the next morning unchanged. Teenagers came up to me because they couldn’t believe a substitute teacher had coordinated such a cool worship service! And I knew that the next time they saw me in school, they would remember this night, but it would make no difference on how they worked, or spoke, or wrote at their desks.
As I got into my car that night, I was done.
In 2021, I would have told you it was because I was furious and frustrated that I couldn’t do anything to meaningfully help teenagers. My mental health was suffering because of it.
In 2022, I would have told you it was because I was tired of how The Church was doing Youth Ministry. I was tired of Christian teens being indistinguishable in schools from their depressed, addicted, ignorant peers.
In 2023, I would have told you it was because I realized I was causing more harm than good around teenagers. My anger at the programming was causing teens to get angry at God, and my desire to create a safe place in schools actually empowered bullies to reign unchecked.
Today, I might tell you I had to stop because the method of youth ministry was trying to change individual teenagers’ relationship to God instead of equipping those teenagers to change their context so that they physically/psychologically could individually relate to God.
In 2025, I might tell you I never stopped ministering to youths, I just ditched programs that night and prioritized relationships thereafter.
I suspect the reason youth leaders were encouraged but I was discouraged was because they only had 2-6hrs of weekly interactions with teens in churches that maybe was! different! Maybe was! transformed! Maybe was! empowered! While I had 24-40hrs of weekly interactions with teens in schools where nothing was different, nothing was transformed, nobody remained empowered.
The same is usually true of ourselves: our friends and therapists have limited and curated interactions with us while we spend 24/7 in our own brains.
Neither frame is “the truth.” Youth ministry reframed its pie situation to make more pies! While we’re just starting to discover the long-term implications of a century of genetically modified and technologically advanced everything, I’d say we’re also just starting to discover the long-term implications of age-based event and programmed ministry.
“Why aren’t young people going to church?” Barna, Christianity Today, and pastors wonder. I’m happy to report from my Catholic and Lutheran family that a lot of them are going to church. Liturgical churches.
Churches where the service has 400-2000 years of history informing the practices done communally on Sundays, where more than 1 verse of scriptures from the Old and New Testament are read at a time each and every single week, where membership usually is preceded by 3-6 months of catechism to back up the validity of their faith not just with emotion or information but with history, spirituality, literature, fellowship, and practice.
Ash Wednesday coincided with Valentine’s Day this week. And that’s a beautiful frame our young people get to walk into Lent with: Dust we are and to dust we shall return but God so loves that he became dust right along with us.
The liturgical frame isn’t “better.” But it is where young people raised in aged-based, event, and programmatic youth groups who find themselves really interested in God are, anecdotally, choosing to spend their Sundays.
Last week I told you that I found the malleability of our brain is a feature, not a flaw. It’s a feature that Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Sozo, and Emmanuel Healing all share in common: to intentionally re-turn and re-frame memories that cause you pain into memories that cause you peace.
That is easy to say, difficult to do, and only partially effective at implementing life change. I suspect part of the reason these therapies fail is because you only reframe your trauma once: if I still lived with my 2022 youth ministry frame, I’d be at peace with my decision but furious with so many people in my life. And if I still lived with my 2023 frame, I would never be friends with a teenager again in an attempt to protect them. And if I hang on long enough to my 2024 frame, I might be able to build a whole new pie for teens, but out of what ingredients? Ones that can keep making new pies?
So I actually have to keep reevaluating my frames. Which, on the one hand, means the method doesn’t work: if you have to keep coming back, are you even healed? But on the other hand, it means the proof is in the pudding: you get a record of your own character development over time, if you can only remember each snapshot of how you viewed the world in each frame.
These therapies are not journal prompts, they’re interactions with real people who come to help protect you from your memories and create a space for you to craft a new identity for said memory. For deeply traumatic memories, you deffs need the support. You might even need to go another layer down with therapy like EMDR or Splankna so you can physically, not just mentally, re-frame your memories.
But if you followed a series of journal prompts once a month for a few months, you could probably have a similar effect. These questions are why I continue to have a different story for why I no longer do youth ministry every time you ask me:
Pray. Invite the LORD to join you in the exercise.
What was going wrong in your memory?
Why were/are you so upset with what was going wrong?
What is true about you now (or the LORD) that changes why you’re so upset?
By the time you re-member and re-frame your memories and beliefs, you can completely change your whole experience - for better, or for worse. A spiral goes up or down depending on how you spin it.
Maybe my frame is wrong. Maybe if I had been able to reframe the benefit of 2-6hrs of difference, I wouldn’t be so upset about the 24-40hrs of sameness I experienced day in and day out. Maybe if my markers for meaning weren’t biblical literacy or routine spiritual discipline or love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control evident even in schools, I’d be a youth pastor in Casper.
That is not my story.
And that is okay.
Our stories aren’t done yet, after all. And so, frame by frame, memory by memory, and day by day, we can be out here making more pies for the people around us.
As long as there’s still ingredients to make pies out of.
—Beth
