There is a point where studying maps needs to transform into exploring the trails. My first two and a half months with YU have been spent primarily raising funds for my salary and expenses, but also researching the Willowdale community. Our team has decided to focus its first aim at outreach in the Willowtree community, using our passion for bikes to engage youth, near our partnering church.

On the day that I first went into Willowtree I had made plans to arrive with my tool box at around 10am. A long-time resident, also a friend, was to meet me and help introduce me to the community. But on my way I found out that she was going to the hospital with her sick daughter. I no longer had a guide.

While I was scared to go into Willowtree, I was frightened even more by the fact that my only contact with “them” had abandoned me. Would I get there and fail to meet anyone? Or, worse yet, meet youth who promptly rejected me? What was I doing!? Let me go back to looking at those maps!

Well, God is extraordinarily talented. There’s nothing like being forced to trust him. As I approached Willowtree and prayed that kids would be somewhere I could meet them and that I’d be given a way to get involved in their lives, God already had things pretty much worked out. And had maybe been prepping this for years.

When I was growing up my brothers and I would build bicycle ramps, get hurt, rebuild, get more ambitious, hurt ourselves, and then do it all over again. Well, when I arrived in the middle of all these buildings, the homes of the youth that I wanted to serve, and no kids were there, I got worried. Then I spotted a young guy on a bike and thought: hey, maybe he needs his bike repaired because I, conveniently, have a tool box that can do just that! So I followed him and saw that he was headed to the basketball court where he and his friends were building a small and rather dangerous ramp. I hesitated, turned around a couple times, pretended to be a little lost, then said aloud: “Do you want to make that ramp better? ‘Cause I could help you do that.”

And I was in.

After three days of repairing bikes, building and tearing down ramps, talking, playing manhunt and mediating between a wielder of a BB gun and the prospective human target, we can only begin to imagine with much excitement what lies ahead. // Jesse J

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