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Don't Keep it to Yourself

Recently I had to confront a girl who was wreaking havoc in my youth program. She was disrupting group settings and disrespecting every staffer except me and one other guy. At 15 years old, she was influential with a lot of the younger kids, but hers was a negative influence.

I knew she was going through a lot, so I hesitated to come down hard on her until she could explain to me what was going on. When I sat her down to talk, I was moved by one of the present sources of her pain: She wanted very badly to borrow my wife’s evening dress, but because it had a spaghetti-strapped back, it revealed still-visible scars from her father’s beatings.

So I told her a story.

When I was two, I said, my father cut out, leaving my mother to raise five children. When I was six, my mother’s abnormal heart, contorted by a childhood bout of rheumatic fever, gave out. She was only 39 when she died. My sister Yolanda suspended her personal life for 12 years to raise me and my other siblings. When I was 19 I learned my father had been dead for three years. But he never came to see me after leaving our home—although he lived just 15 miles away.

My story was in the ballpark—it got her attention. I looked her in the eye and said nothing can justify mistreating others. She seemed to get the message.

It’s odd to actually verbalize it, but it’s great to have a personal story like mine when you’re in youth ministry. I don’t mean to make light of the difficulties I went through; there were days when I thought I’d never make it and long periods of gray solitude when I felt disconnected from everyone and everything.

But when kids are going through personal difficulties—or just being difficult personalities—there’s nothing like a true story of hardship to jerk them back onto the right track.

My most effective story this summer was recited to every kid who dared complain about not having new shoes, not getting tickets to a Dodgers game, or hating school.

I know someone in Mexico City who would trade places with you right now, I’d say. In fact, I can arrange for the switch immediately. From the time I call, it will only take her a few minutes to pack her bags and say goodbye to her family. All we need is your consent, and in no time you can exit this vale of misery and wake up in a town where you’d beg to have the opportunity to wear your beat-up shoes, listen to the Dodgers on the radio, and go to class.

Like my own, this story hit the bulls-eye. The kids in our program all know about Mexican poverty—having had numerous opportunities to touch it with their own hands—and they got the point. Quit complaining. Be grateful. Get back to work.

These stories get through to kids so quickly that sometimes I feel bad for using them. In a way they’re sacred. Sometimes I feel like I even cross a line when I use them. But often that’s what’s needed.

• A rape victim who told her story in a nationally circulated urban ministry newsletter helped thousands of Christians confront their fears about life in the city.

• An hiv-infected young woman who contracted the disease from her sexually duplicitous partner stayed in bed for a year. But when she chose to tell others, she convinced thousands that it could happen even to nice kids who stray outside God’s will for abstinence before marriage.

What’s shameful to us (or others) can be redemptive when guided by the Holy Spirit. We shouldn’t be afraid to tell students our hardship stories or to describe the hardships of others. These stories can help our young people take their minds off themselves. They can help our young people think more hopefully when they realize they’re not alone or unique in their misery.

Hardship stories also transform the teller. I was released from a dungeon of shame when I first began to share openly about my jacked-up family situation. One of my sisters still can’t speak about our upbringing, and she resents me for my public voice on the subject.

But for me there is liberation. I feel the hope surging through me every time I implore a kid to keep trying.

"You can make it!" I say. "I had nothing. I used to feel like a weed out of the ground. I thought no one cared I was there and no one would be sad if I was gone.

"But God did it! He made something out of nothing. The fact that I’m standing here telling you this proves it. He wants to do it for you, too. All you have to do is ask."

Yes, mine is a good story. A powerful story. A true story.

But the best part is that I didn’t keep it to myself.

Rudy Carrasco is associate director of a parachurch ministry, Harambee Christian Family Center, in Pasadena, California. Rudy—who’s been published in the Los Angeles Times and Christianity Today—also served as managing editor of Urban Family magazine and worked with John Perkins’ racial reconciliation foundation. You can e-mail him at genxlatino@aol.com.