PLEASE NOTE: I am going to Nashville this weekend for a swim meet, so I probably won't have access to the internet to post blog stuff. I am going to try to write out blog entries each day, but we will see if that actually happens (swimming is a busy life.) If I don't get to write anything, know that I am thinking of you!
I just got back from a Wednesday night discussion, for the first time at the Hills' house (I suppose if you aren't a part of my youth group, I suppose this won't mean that much to you), and I must say that I am profoundly impressed. The atmosphere was just so, so, good for fostering discussion and I felt like a lot of people who are not normally very engaged were making great, thought-provoking contributions. It is very refreshing to hear these new perspectives, and this is probably the first Wednesday night that I have really been pushed to think about what the discussion means to me and what my opinions are when pitted next to the opinions of others.
But I was really moved by the fact that a few freshmen that don't normally talk spoke up and made a contribution. As a freshman in youth group, I attended these Wednesday nights every single week, and I would always sit in awe, listening to the upperclassmen discuss profound matters, thoughts spinning through my head at a million miles per hour. I would leave these discussions deep in thought, and it was these discussions that really made my freshman year infinitely more fulfilling and a much greater learning experience than it ever could have been otherwise. The comments that the upperclassmen would make would put into words either ideas that I had never been able to dictate, or ideas that had never before crossed my mind. Either way, the effect was profound.
Gradually I gained the ability to form my own opinions on what was discussed, but these thoughts stayed sealed up inside my head. I have no shame in admitting that I got C's on every one of my speeches in my oral comm class, simply because I am so much more of a writer than I am a speaker. I am the kind of person that, while eloquent in text, inadvertently adds ums and uhs to her sentences when speaking candidly; the kind of person that stumbles over the words that sound so perfect in her head. I don't think I ever spoke up once during a Wednesday night discussion my freshman year, in part because I was intimidated by the profound older kids, but also because of my discomfort with my own opinions and with going about their verbalization.
I figured that by my junior year, I would be confident enough to share my thoughts with the group. And while that was not entirely true, because my Wednesday night attendance wavered during that year because of the amount of schoolwork I had, I suppose I spent my sophomore and junior year preparing for what would come my senior year. And, yes, more senior year sappiness, but I feel that we are doing a very good job within the youth group with encouraging underclass participation, not because we try to force it, but because we try to act more open and welcoming than the seniors my freshman year ever did.
That is why having freshman participation to me was so touching. I feel like I am really doing something right with the group of seniors that are in my youth group. I feel like we are making people more confident with their own opinions and with vocalizing them. I feel like we are inspiring them, like we are helping them realize who they are.
And maybe I am the only one who really was this affected by these Wednesday night discussions. Maybe I am the only one who was really that scared to make their opinions vulnerable by putting them out in the open where they could be picked apart in discussion. But even if I am, at least I know that I have overcome this, and that I have even the slightest chance of helping someone do the same.
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