Friendship, Family and Faith: Youth group is safe place during difficult time

Intensely playing “Minute to Win It” games and devouring too many pieces of cheese pizza in the basement of Christ Church Anglican has been my Wednesday night routine since the summer of 2012 — the summer that my grandfather died suddenly.

From the perspective of an 11-year-old girl whose main concern at the time was who I was going to have as my sixth-grade teacher, my grandpa’s death brought in a combination of confusion and heartbreak that I had never dealt with before.

The timing for when I began attending youth group at Christ Church Anglican (CCA) and when my grandpa died was coincidental, but the many changes occurring in my life pushed me to rely on the consistency I could only find on Wednesday nights.

I had been to funerals, so death was not a foreign concept. However, my grandpa had seemed untouchable. Death had never felt so personal. I didn’t know how to talk through the new reality that a person who was so loud, so brutally funny and so present was no longer there.

Church was the place where I learned how to live without him. There were snacks, games and people available to listen and talk and be a positive presence — people who met me where I was.

Now the church, less than a minute drive from my house, and the community of people that come with it will be over 200 miles away from me.  

That summer, Wednesday nights became the time for me to process not only my grandpa’s death but the drama surrounding sixth-grade graduation dresses and where my assigned seat was on the bus to Indian Hills.

I showed them pictures of potential dress options for cotillion in seventh grade and homecoming freshman year. They listened to me panic about moving my ACT score one point and laughed at me when I failed miserably at knock-out. They’ve complained about the cost of college with me and hashed out every pro and con of every single potential major (there were a lot) before I ever made a decision. From every meaningless detail of my life to where I will spend the next four years, they’ve listened to it all.

I am not ready to give that up in the fall when I leave for college. CCA was my happy place — I ran in the hallways barefoot there, I was baptized there, I even shared the juicy details behind my accidental drug deal sophomore year there. I am not ready to give up summer mission trips and winter retreats because these are my people — and in less than six months I will be in another state.

While there are plenty of church groups at the University of Nebraska, I have spent most of my life building trust and camaraderie with this particular group of people, and I will have to start over completely.

What am I going to do without the people who are OK with me showing up at their house, sometimes unannounced and in my pajamas, to watch “The Office” or pick apart what a particular Bible verse means?

I have been mentally preparing myself for this transition for the past several months — thinking about what has made my youth group so impactful to me, how I am going to make friends when I have been with the same people for the past six years and what I am going to say to a group of complete strangers who don’t already understand my sense of humor.

I have never been more miserable while painting an old woman’s house an odd shade of pink during a summer mission trip, but because of the people I was with, I have also never been happier. I am not ready to move on from the group of people whose constant singing made the 100-degree heat bearable.

I am not inclined to strike up a conversation with a random stranger at Starbucks, but I won’t have an alternative in the fall. Having a group of people I can speed dial when I‘m in tears about a test is more important to me than my discomfort during an awkward handshake with a potential new youth group leader.

No one will be able to replace the group of people that have been my family since middle school, but I guess it’s time to try.