TRC Students: Important Information About Our Time Tonight

Dear Parents,
I wanted to make this post to inform you of a few things as well as what we will be doing tonight in youth.
Tonight during youth, we're going to be addressing the tragedy that occurred last week when a middle schooler here in Rome took his own life. We wanted to address this as a student ministry because this is something that weighs heavily on our hearts, as he was somebody who was close to the community, and because of the reaching impact and implications that it has on our students and your children.

Tonight will be a heavy night as we talk about the reality of what occurred, how the enemy attacks, and what our response to this tragedy should be. Below in this post are my notes for tonight, showing and detailing what we will be discussing for a brief period of time. Mitch will be spending some time after me addressing what it looks like to truly love one another well in light of the tragedy that has occurred.
I know there may be some of you who desire to hold your students back from coming tonight because it is a very heavy topic and you are welcome to do that. However, I want to encourage you not to do that because this student that took his own life last week was a student who came from a Christian family and was the same age, if not just a few years away from the same age, as your students. He loved the Lord, was a part of church, and was a student that nobody ever thought would ever do this.

I'm not saying that as a warning but I want to say this as a concern: we never want to miss the hard conversations because this is a reality of the world that we live in. We want to make sure that this never happens to one of our students.

We, as a ministry, and I as one of your ministry directors, want to do everything that we can to love and support your children and our students during this time. We want to love on them and show them that they are loved and cherished, are image bearers, and have value far greater than anything that they can understand. We want to partner with you to be able to do that.

Tonight might be a hard night of student ministry and that's okay but we want your students there. We want to be there to support you as parents as well.

Please take a look at my notes below. Please contact me personally or any of the other ministry directors, Marco or Kayla, if you do have any questions or concerns going into this Wednesday night. If there's anything that we can do to support you and your family during this time, or just anything at all, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We love you all dearly. We love your kids dearly, and we're thankful for the opportunity to get to serve them in ministry and to walk alongside you all in partnership to invest into them. 

Thank you.
-Stephen Galloway
Ministry Director, TRC Student Ministry

NOTES

Hey everyone, so tonight is going to look a bit different than normal. We are going to be pausing our Study of 1 John. Instead, we want to take some time to address and respond to the tragedy that happened last week. 

Last Wednesday night, a middle schooler in Rome took his own life. I don't know if any of you knew him personally. Some of y'all could have gone to school with him. Some of you may be hearing about this for the first time. Either way, I want us to sit with this tonight instead of moving past it.

I don't know the specific circumstances around what occurred or what led him to do this act. What I do know is that every night since then a mother and a father have dearly missed their son, and two sisters have dearly missed their brother. The community has mourned for him.

What I've heard over and over again since then is that he was a kid that nobody would have expected this to have happened to. Unfortunately, this gets said far too often after this occurs in communities.

I'll be honest: since I heard the news of what happened, I have been sick to my stomach. As a father, as a leader to you all, this has been tearing me apart because I recognize the gravity of what has occurred to that family. This is something we don't want to take lightly.

There is a grieving that occurs from this, even if you don't know him. An image bearer of the Lord chose to take his own life and so we want to take the time first to lament what has happened. Then we have got to recognize the evil that has occurred. We need to ground ourselves in Scripture and then we need to know what to do to prevent the next.

Psalm 88 is a really interesting psalm in the Bible. It is a psalm of lament. It opens up with direct cries to God and describes a soul that is full of troubles and at the end of it, it doesn't resolve. It ends with expressions of despair. There are times in our hearts and our souls where we can't just resolve something cleanly.

There's a song that I love to listen to. It's called "Grief Joy & Gratitude" by Joe zl Barnes and it is a song that I think does a really great job because he says “Grief is such a windy road. You can try to keep it steady, but it moves when it gets ready. They say it's love without a home because it hurts to feel the distance, to speak of you in the past tense. I could let my heart grow bitter and cold but I will bless the Lord of my soul.”
That's a song that I appreciate because it does describe what grief truly is and how it moves for us. I don't expect whatever grief you feel tonight from this conversation to resolve neatly tonight. I expect you to have to work through that. 

Before I tell you what to do with those feelings that you have, I need you to hear who you are underneath all of those feelings.
Genesis 1:26-27: “Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them.”

Psalm 139:13-16
“For you formed my inner parts and you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you for I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works! My soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance and you knew me. Your book was written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

When you hear those passages what is it that you hear? Do you hear the value that you as a person have? Your worth isn't up for debate. This is something that can be challenged even in your own head but that isn't up for debate. Your value isn't something that you get to choose. You are loved and cherished by the Lord, by us who are in this room together, and by me.

Each one of you is not alone on the path that you are walking and you are deeply loved and cherished. Not because of what you do, or how you speak, or what your interests are, but you are loved and cherished because of whom you are made in the image of and we love you for who you are. Not because of what you bring to this room, or the jokes that you make, or the sandwiches that you eat, or the mess that you make, or the footballs that you throw, but because you are here.

If you are in a place where you are having those thoughts and you're feeling that tearing of your soul as you wrestle with this idea of being cherished and loved, I want to tell you what those thoughts actually are, because naming a thing matters. We have to name it correctly. Those thoughts are not coming from you. 
1 Peter 5:8: "Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." These thoughts that you're ashamed of, the ones you think no one else has ever had, they're not just you. We have to name them as an attack in order to not just identify them but to be able to disarm them. 

John 10:10: "The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. I came that you may have life and have it abundantly." 
These thoughts that we can have in our mind are as if you have gotten cut and you have an infected wound. If you leave that wound untreated, you picked up that bacteria from somewhere. If you just ignore the wound, it will rot, it will fester, and it will lead to death.

The thoughts that we are talking about here, these thoughts that have been planted in your mind by the enemy, if they are not addressed, then they too will fester and they will lead to death.

When you're in this place of having these thoughts, it can be all-consuming because you're in a state of dysregulation. You're in a place where your body, your mind, and your emotions are in an uncontrollable place. You get tunnel vision where you're so locked in on this that you can't see anything else outside of the tunnel in which you're looking down.

I've experienced this before. I've been driving down the interstate this one time over on the other side of Atlanta and I was tired. I didn't have good control over my own body and my mind. I noticed this white van had started creeping over the line. It was getting really close to me and I freaked out. I honked at this person, and I swerved, and I tried to get away from them, only to realize that it was just me and this person on the interstate. I could have just braked, sped up, or gotten away from him. Instead, I was locked in on that vehicle because I was so worried about what was going to happen. That's what tunnel vision is when you're in that state of mind: dysregulation of your body and of your brain.

And the way out of that moment isn't gritting your teeth to get harder to get out of it. 
And so if you don't take anything else away from today, I want you to hear this: our brains and our bodies calm down through connection, connection with other people and with the Lord, not through willpower alone, but by not sitting with it in silence, hoping that it passes. This is not a flaw that is within you. This is how you were built and how you were intended. Ecclesiastes 4:2, "Two are better than one. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken."

Paul would write later in Galatians 6:2, "Bear one another's burdens." Turn what you are feeling not inward but outward. We owe that to each other. Someone in this room might need you to notice them and we, as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, get to lock arms with one another and love each other through these moments. We are meant to do this together not alone.
When that thought comes, tell someone. If it's happening tonight, tell a leader, tell your parents, tell a friend. Don't just let it sit only in your head because that's exactly where it grows. We are here as a resource for you. Whatever time it is, whatever day it is, these numbers are free for you to take. Know that there is a person on the other end that cares for you. Every single person in this room cares about you. These leaders that we have here in this room are not just random people that we picked up off the street but we are intentional. They are not here because they are getting paid a lot of money to be here. They are here because they love you.

Romans 8:38-29
38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Before you leave here tonight, I want you to know. I want to reiterate that you are loved, you are cherished, not just by us, not just by your parents, but by the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the one who died in your place for your sins and who rose, defeating death. So you are not alone. If you or somebody you know is struggling, please come to us. Don't hold that in.