Youth Unlimited provides opportunities for young leaders and ministry workers to be Youth Interns across the GTA. Jesse James has recently joined the North York team as Willowdale Outreach Youth Intern. Internships provide an opportunity for young leaders to gain on-the-ground experience and refine their own sense of passion and gifting. Read on for some of Jesse’s reflections as he begins this journey…
Just the other day I was sent a quote from Jean Vanier about idealism. Interestingly enough, I have spent over the past five years or so, since my Pyschology of Personality class and university in general, mulling over in my head – like a cow chews its cud – how truly idealistic I am. And according to Vanier, giving ourselves over to ideals is the part of life where children are found, rather than adults.
In a way, that’s saying children believe in Santa Claus, but adults don’t because they know the aisle in the store where that remote control car came from, and they know how expensive that PSP was.
But I am 24. I’m not a child…right?
Here’s what I’m thinking. A chap named Eric Ericsson described what he saw as the life stages that most humans go through. The two stages that concern me right now are the “adolescent” stage (one that I have passed through…more or less), and the “young adulthood” stage (the one that I have mostly passed into, I hope).
What intrigues me about the “adolescent” stage are the two traits that Ericsson saw as the fundamental challenge for everyone at that point in their life: Identity vs. Role Confusion. He describes an adolescent’s tendency to devote themselves to ideals which are conflict free, unimpeachable, and strong as fortresses. Great ideas, philosophies and broad statements were enormously attractive to me at this stage because they seem to give order to a chaotic world, or fly like an eagle above the messiness of the earth. They make a mockery of “reality” which is not conflict free but confusing, contradictory and unpleasant. I don’t like confusing. But I’m not a die-hard capitalist either.
He says that folks in this stage need to discover their individuality which is separate from those they grew up with, and identify themselves as members of a wider society. In this process we need to establish a “philosophy of life” which makes us susceptible to idealisms and eagle-like understanding of things in which we have no experience. We easily, and wrongly, substitute fortresses for seemingly defenseless little towns because our very limited experience says that these fortresses are like the Titanic: can’t be sunk.
I think I am full of ideals. And the process over the last few years has stripped away much of my naivety to the point that I am rather embarrassed that I thought I knew so much, and probably alienated people with my strong and absolutist language about life.
And this process has brought me to YU. It would be very easy, but equally as wrong, to come into this ministry with an idealistic, and unrealistic, approach. It would be foolish to think that the Willowdale region in which I am now working will be transformed in 6 months, or even 2 years (or, sadly, even 20 years).
The stage I’m in, and the stage that many of my coworkers in North York are in, happens to be the one that struggles over “Intimacy and Solidarity vs. Isolation”. The thing is, once we have figured out a little of who we are as individuals and that our great answers to life are not as great as we thought they were, then we will do one of two things: move closer to people or move further away from them. Either we’ll cling to ideals that, like a fortress or an eagle, separates us and isolates us from the world, or we’ll knock down the walls and come in for a landing so that we can be where the people are; where our battlements and soaring-in-the-clouds won’t keep us from one another.
The only “idea” that seems to keep my feet planted is the knowledge that servanthood breaks barriers and lifts other people up rather than protecting only me or letting me fly alone among the mountain tops. The only “philosophy” that encourages me to seek solidarity and intimacy is the knowledge that all are made in God’s image, and that Jesus has made a way for us to achieve the otherwise unachievable.
So, as I begin my ministry in Willowdale with Youth Unlimited, it is my prayer that, as Vanier said, we would “struggle to be truthful and free and to be servant-leaders like Jesus.” And that we all would “grow from spiritual childhood and adolescence to spiritual maturity, and discover the presence of God in the pain of reality.” THAT is no Santa Claus idealism. // Jesse J
To launch the next round Blueprints program, we’ll be hosting multiple orientation sessions to introduce young people from Jane Finch to entrepreneurship, self-employment and the Blueprints program itself. 
When it comes to our Sketch & Believe Girls’ Arts Program, school holidays always present an opportunity to do special events and spend some quality time with the girls. This past March Break, we gathered one afternoon to watch the Chris Rock documentary “Good Hair” – it’s all about the “complex relationship” between African Americans and their hair. 
