I’m not a youth worker. I do admire people who, regardless of their own age, are so tuned to youth culture that they are not only aware of, but understand and appreciate the music, language and various markers of hipness that appear to shift with blinding swiftness to a dinosaur like me. (Is “hipness” even a quality people under 20 recognize or desire? I have no idea.) But it’s totally beyond me.

In my community, rife as it is with homelessness, addiction, psychiatric illness, prostitution and a thousand other dysfunctions, even those who are chronologically young enough to bear the designation “youth” are old beyond their years. I’ve been here a long time, long enough to see a lot of people who were youths, when I first met them, grow into middle age. Too many of them have passed before their time.

The lesson I’ve learned more often than any other is that I can’t save anyone. God can, but I can’t. And God doesn’t seem to do it as often as I think He should.

That all might sound depressing, so far, especially compared to youth work, where everyone still has such potential, most have such great energy, and even if someone screws it up, they have a lifetime left to sort it out. But it has brought me to something deeper, sounder, more joyful and far less fragile than relying on my effectiveness as a minister as the source of fulfillment—something that’s at the very heart of God’s desire for all of us, whether we care for suburban youth or homeless addicts.

There are, I imagine, a number of dangers specific to youth work. For instance, there’s the danger of relevance—the temptation to apply spiritual principles to the needs of youth as they perceive them (a dodgy business, as youth are not, as a group, notably objective), and to submit the expression of those principles to idioms and values that can change quickly. There’s the danger of irrelevance—the inclination of the broader culture, and in many cases the parents, to be more interested in safety and entertainment for the kids than real discipleship. And there’s the danger of success—the idea that the creation of a large, happy, active group of youth who are compliant with church culture is the benchmark by which you as a youth worker may be judged by parents or church leaders—or by your own self.

This last probably represents the greatest danger to your soul. Where such expectations are the case, concern for the spiritual health of the youth worker is too often a very low priority. Whether I’m working with street-involved people, or you’re working with youth who have a connection with church, we need that something deeper to anchor our own souls as we seek to care for those of others, and to remind us of what is at the heart of God’s agenda for us.

Re-imagine with me this familiar story from the life of Jesus:

There was a crowd, as usual, although dawn had barely broken. Hunkered on the banks of the river, scratching themselves absently and yawning, waiting for him to appear. Narrow ribbons of smoke stretching lazily upward in the still air from the ashes of a dozen small fires made and tended through the cold night. They had missed out the day before and decided to stay rather than making the long trek back to Jerusalem…

A furious rustling in the low, dense bushes lining the opposite bank—a pair of bony hands and one hairy leg emerged, thrust some branches aside, and the rest of the Baptist followed into view. A mutter ran through the crowd. The men stood up, the children stopped their games and stared. The Baptist stared back for a long moment, then nodded, apparently satisfied with what he saw, and turned his back on them.

His hair hung in matted hanks down his back. Everything about him seemed to be the same color as the desert floor. He undressed quickly, giving his ghastly camel-skin jerkin a flap—a cloud of ochre dust drifted away from it—before hanging it as carefully as if it were a linen robe on a branch of the bush from which he had appeared. As he bent to untie his sandals, he presented a pair of pale, scrawny cheeks so perfectly to his audience that a child guffawed. The Baptist gave no sign of noticing, but did procure a scrap of dirty cloth from a leather bag he had been carrying, and girded himself with it…

With a grin at the mob opposite, the Baptist leapt into the river. It was only thigh deep, but he submerged himself, then floated face first to the surface. The mud he had disturbed bloomed creamily about him for a moment before the current shredded it and the river resumed its placid olive sheen…

Finally standing upright, he began to preach. It was the same simple message they had heard repeatedly the day before. He kept up a running commentary as people waded into the river, as he embraced them, flung them backward into the muddy water, thrust any part of them that had not been submerged under the surface, then yanked them upright again. Always, it seemed, just as he had gotten to a point in his sermon when he could shout “…forgiven!”

“I am only baptizing you with water,” he cried, “as a symbol that you have turned your faces away from your wicked ways, and toward God, and so you will know He has washed you clean—your sins are forgiven! No, I am not Messiah—but He is coming soon! His kingdom is close enough to touch! He will sink you into the Holy Spirit, cleanse you with fire!”…

Faltering to a stop, he turned to look squarely at the man a dozen steps upstream who had been waving circumspectly to him since shortly after he began his harangue…

He was nothing special to look at. Just an ordinary man of ordinary height, complexion and hair color. He was dressed like everybody around Him. He didn’t seem to be with anyone—in fact, when they talked about it later, those around Him who had so jealously guarded their positions at the river’s edge weren’t quite sure when He had arrived, or how He had made His way in front of them.

The ordinary man and the Baptist conversed quietly, oblivious to the fascinated mob around them…

The two appeared to argue in a good-natured way, the man eventually cajoling the Baptist into some kind of agreement. He removed his outer garment and handed it to a young fellow in the crowd who, though he had never met the man before, received it and draped it over his arm as placidly as if he had followed Him there for that express purpose. The man stepped into the river, found His footing, and plodded toward the middle, arm in arm with the Baptist.

For once, the Baptist was silent. He embraced the man with both arms, held Him tight against His hollow chest, head bowed. Although he had been enthusiastically flinging people of all shapes and sizes into the water for hours, he now seemed reluctant, or perhaps embarrassed. Gently, the Baptist lowered the man into the water, bending until his own arms were submerged to the biceps; a heartbeat’s pause while he was completely out of sight, then the Baptist slowly raised Him up again.

He sputtered and blew and rubbed His eyes as had everyone else. He smiled and, placing a hand against the Baptist’s hairy cheek, spoke a few inaudible words as if in blessing. Then He turned and began wading toward the bank…

His eyes were turned skyward, over the heads of the people. Those nearest Him could see His lips were moving soundlessly. The Baptist, forgotten for the moment, stood motionless behind Him, his hands dangling in the hip-deep water.

There was a tearing sound from above—thunder, perhaps, is what some thought later. A curious purplish cloud formation—which looked like a gash across what had been, as far as anyone could remember, an empty sky only moments before—seemed to flutter open. A dark spot descending quickly from the gash—the gash seemed strangely near for a cloud—resolved into a dove, a very ordinary-looking dove, but with it came a gentle breeze, gentle and warm and beautifully moist in the desert air.

The man was smiling broadly, raising His eyebrows and looking up without tilting His head, as well He might, as the dove had landed upon it and sat there cooing comfortably…

The gash in the clouds rippled repeatedly, as a man’s heart beats, and each time there was another puff of the warm breeze. As if the sky was breathing upon them. The sky breathed a word into them, all those people standing there looking at the man. With each breath a phrase:

“This is My Son. My beloved. I am pleased with Him.”

They all heard it, though it was so quiet it might have been easily missed. They knew the voice was speaking about the ordinary man, the man who looked like them. Many also heard the breeze speak directly to the man. Hearing it as they did, like the breath within their own bodies, they wondered if it spoke not also to each of them:

“You are My child—my son, my daughter. I love you. And I am pleased with you.”

* * *

If every story has certain pivotal moments, moments that clarify everything that has gone before and set up everything that’s to come, surely this is such a moment in the story of God’s relationship with humanity…The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are tangibly—and uniquely—present at this extraordinary event: the voice from above, the man on the riverbank and the Spirit descending “like a dove” from voice to man, connecting them visibly. Here, by the words he chooses, God reveals His unique relationship with Jesus, and that He intends to relate to us also as a parent does to his or her child…

In this crucial moment, Jesus is not only God-with-Us; He is also, mysteriously and wonderfully, One-of-Us. He stands in that muddy river, disappears beneath its surface and rises as a representative of all humanity and as its salvation. He represents God and me.

So, when the voice from heaven speaks, the message is not only for the unique Son of God, but is also for every human being—even youth workers!

“You’re my child. My beloved. My pleasure.”

This is the heart of the matter. This is the message that blows quietly, sweetly through the whole Bible…

There are a thousand other voices, most of them much louder and more insistent, that have other things to say about who I am. They say things that are demeaning or discouraging. Sometimes they say things that make me so proud of myself that I forget God is whispering His beautiful message to everyone else, too. Sometimes they speak words that cut or bruise my soul, telling me I am unlovely and unlovable—a message I am unaccountably ready to believe. They may be the voices of people close to me, the culture around me, the advertising I can’t escape, religion, education or of my own innate insecurities or pride…

But the word this voice speaks is the antidote to all of that, the anchor for my soul when it is buffeted by the expectations of others, or my own failures or life’s inevitable tragedies. This is God’s true calling for me, His announcement of who I really am:

My child. My beloved. My pleasure.

This article adapted with permission from Close Enough to Hear God Breathe: The Great Story of Divine Intimacy by Greg Paul (Thomas Nelson, 2011).