Young, Bright, and Talented: The Stolen Years
What does it feel like to be used for the glory of God?
It’s the closest we ever got to what Gaga might feel during a concert. A Supernova bursts from the center of your being, all brilliant colors of light and pure energy radiating outward, basking your fellow humans in golden transcendence. You are the conduit plugged into The Source, the instrument chosen to bring glory and bless the eager outstretched hands. In return are elation and joy and the sense that you and God together are AWESOME.
As someone in the Ministering Arts (church version of the performing arts) sector of my church, I had my share of attention for being anointed to manifest God’s glory. We were singers, choir members, dancers, actors, musicians, artistic directors, preachers, worship leaders, revolutionaries, and interpreters of the Divine. We were young, and we were talented.
Church leaders knew that if they were to win the culture war and restore everything back to Jesus, they had to harvest the nation’s youth. Some, like me, were born into it and knew nothing other than how special we were. Others were conscripted from local, nationwide, and sometimes worldwide churches. Adoration and praise for talent are scarcely all a young person needs in return for uncompromising zealotry.
Living, breathing, thinking, and eating God’s righteousness is your nature. You wake up before dawn and pray for an hour, sometimes three. You think about how God will use you in the next church service. You practice and hone your skill by going to church choir practice, play rehearsal, dance classes, and voice lessons. You write plays, sketches, sermons, and always journal your ideas. You tell your family you can’t spend time with them because you are busy being a servant of the Lord. Your friends are those you serve with. You take directives from leaders and God, alone. You hope, pray, and wait to be chosen to lead worship, to choreograph a special number for a visiting pastor, to get the lead part in the play, and to travel on a mission trip with a prominent leader. Everything in you wants to be on the front lines of the battle because that is what you are trained for. That is why you were selected by God and your leaders. Your biggest fear is to disappoint your leaders or not be seen by them, so you go the extra mile to please and to be seen. Your ministry is for God, but your performance is for your leaders.
Some of my performance pieces included but weren’t limited to attending three or more church meetings a week, repentance for sins, laying down dance for making it my idol, working my light-hearted and joyful schtick, sharing a word of the Lord from the pulpit, and spending hours poring over the concordance to study the Bible. I performed and performed and performed with the great hope to be selected, and if I was, then thanks be to God! If I wasn’t, then I hadn’t worked hard enough to be noticed, I displeased my leaders and failed God.
You spend your youth serving your heart out. You attach yourself to a favorite pastor. You get to know them, they become more important to you than your own family members and you give them your implicit trust. You confide in your leaders that your family doesn’t understand your all-consuming passion for the service of the Lord, so your leaders protect you from your family’s dissent. Maybe you actively cut your family off or simply see yourself as better than them. You’ve got a new family now, and you don’t question them.
Until one day, you do.
And when you are 12, 17, 19, 25, and 30 years old and can’t ignore your tender and regretful thoughts toward your family, challenge a directive, ask why something is, or feel like something about your unwavering dedication isn’t quite right, your questioning taps a fissure on the surface of the facade. Suddenly you are prized and cherished less and looked over for lead roles, important mission trips, and inner-circle gatherings. Your counterparts clamor in the wings for your spotlight and you are replaced because they don’t ask questions.
But wait, what has happened? You are loved. God Himself anointed you! You are born for such a time as this, they always say. So how is your humanity such a blight that one shred of empathy, curiosity, and personal sense of right and wrong discards you from usefulness?
You gave them your best. All your talent, all your internal resources and physical body to serve. You denied what would bring you pleasure for that which would bring you favor. You turned down opportunities - real opportunities for proper training, education, and learning. You rejected people who tried to intervene. Everything you had was God’s and theirs to use as they saw fit. And now they can’t use you. You turn over your faults, spend more time in prayer and repentance. You find things to confess and sacrifice your talents to spend more time in God’s presence. You scrabble in brokenness to find your way back up to favor. But you’ve lost it.
The facade is shattered and you become sick with the revelation that you gave them your youth. Your years of curiosity and discovery harnessed as a conduit to bring glory to God. Your youth will never be won back so you spend years of your adulthood trying to find the pieces of yourself that were true, and discern the difference between who they said you were, and who you really are, or maybe who you’ve always been. How would you even know? You’ve only ever been informed about yourself by the people who used you. You weren’t allowed to decide who you were. All that time you could have been exercising your talent in self-discovery and fulfillment derived not from outward approval, but inward satisfaction. Your youth appropriated and discarded. Making up for it in adulthood in destructive ways or finally getting your shit together enough to live in healthy ways.
Depressing, right? Why say these things out loud and run the risk of people telling me I’m a bitter victim, it wasn’t that bad, and how sad that I haven’t moved on? Over the years I’ve conducted interviews with people I grew up with in the church. Some of these interviews brought me to tears and were so heart-breaking that It has only been recently that I’ve returned to them. And while I haven’t asked these individuals for permission to write about their experiences, I find it necessary to testify to the overall sentiment so many of us have felt - that our youth had been stolen from us.
And now, some of us are scrambling in our 40’s to attain degrees and catch up on pop culture (how many times do I lose to my children in Name That Tune). Some of us spent years emptying bottles and chasing chemical highs or self-harming, contemplating whether it’s worth it to stick around. Some of us continue spiritual journeys, pay small fortunes to therapists, a few keep striving for the inner glory circle, and most of us have found out how to reconstruct and move on in meaningful ways.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, others of you feel it too. I recently received a message from a friend I hadn’t spoken with in over a decade. Here’s part of what she said
Knowing the digging I’ve had to do within myself to be able to even say “I’m probably bi” is a lot. I still get so angry when I think of all of the people whose lives were stolen for so long. The lengths we have to go to now to just unearth these beings that we buried as children to fit into our assigned boxes. The optimist in me wants to say “I wouldn’t be who I am today without having to fight for it,” but the realist in me says fuck that shit! No human being should have to deal with this.
If nothing else, we have learned and fine-tuned our bullshit detectors. We have become who we are via a treacherous path. Yes, there were a few good feelings derived from a sense of community and common purpose. But I especially wanted to give validation to those of us for whom the struggle has been real. Recognizing the destruction is a step toward healing. Trying to gloss over it or say just move on and forgive is looping back to the rhetoric our church employed for all discomforts. It is ok to feel anger, sadness, and loss. It is ok to admit that you are frustrated by missing out on opportunities you could have had in your youth, that would have driven you sooner to the things you are only now discovering. And hopefully, you have found things that bring you joy, that make you feel not the carefully fabricated fantasy of someone else’s glory - but the real you who is still bright, talented, but now a lot wiser. Plug into yourself and know that YOU are AWESOME.
