From the Heart of a Student: Apathy

There is a sin that has been festering and lurking in my youth group and, I realize, has now broken out into an epidemic:  apathy, carelessness, and unresponsiveness.  I am victim to the sin as well but by the grace of God and the relentless care of a youth pastor, I will not allow myself to be victim anymore.

This is a huge problem that I not only see in my own church, but in the church body as a whole.  Us teenagers, we want to feel something.  Every single time we open up our Bible we want to be impacted and although the Bible does and will impact, we may not feel like it does.  So, we get sick of reading.  Eventually, we get sick of praying because we feel like we’re talking to the wall.  As time goes on, we don’t even bother to sing because we don’t feel God or because we’ve hardened our hearts so much that we feel like frauds.  We feel like liars when we sing the song, so, we don’t.  We continue to live each day not caring like the day before.  We don’t listen to the Holy Spirit within us anymore and we coat a seemingly impenetrable layer around our hearts made of sin.  We continue to sin, feeling less guilty each day.  We get to the point that we know we’re wrong, but we don’t care to change.  It’s easier not to fight.  It’s easier to follow the direction everyone else goes.  It’s easier to mold to the world and to do as it says.  It’s easier to give into Satan.  We allow our lives to become so hardened, calloused, and impervious that even our closest friends can’t reach us.  Their words are true.  They come from the Scriptures, but we don’t care.  We’ve grown accustomed to the hole we dug for ourselves.  We kind of like the murk around the edges and the darkness of the hole.  Why would we want the light to shine on our dirty, sickening, filth-infested hole?  We wouldn’t.  So, we stay in our hole.  We start to hate the light because we like being careless in our hole, but it penetrates.  It hurts.  So, we hide from the light and we continue to be beyond carelessness.

We need to hear the truth.  We need you to be relentless.  We need you to not only fight for us in prayer, but to fight for us with your actions.  We need to hear what we don’t want to.  Please, this epidemic is breaking my heart.  My youth group is crumbling apart because the people in it have all been affected by apathy and it keeps spreading around.  We just don’t care.  Maybe we want to care, but we completely and honestly do not care.  We need you to tell us to repent.  Without repentance, there cannot be forgiveness.  We need you to challenge us to stop living out a passive faith, but to live a proactive and even aggressive faith.  We need to be aggressive in this fight against the sin that so easily entangles.  We need you to shine your light on us.  We need you to not give up on us, because we’ve already given up on ourselves.

Simply tell us the truth:  apathy leads to death, but God brings revival.

Leah Goode is a 15-year-old from Arkansas.  She likes reading books on philosophy and theology, music by Jon Foreman, Claude Debussy, Doris Day, and Phil Wickham, and Modern Warfare.  Leah’s biggest pet peeve is being sticky.