Every scary movie I’ve ever seen is littered with it—suspense. There is a scene where the villain is hiding, and even though you know exactly where he is, you watch eagerly on the edge of your seat waiting for him to pop out of the shadows to shock someone innocently walking into his trap.
It’s called dramatic irony, when you know something the characters don’t. Writers commonly use this plot device to create suspense and draw their audience into their stories. Shakespeare famously loved dramatic irony. Plays such as Romeo and Juliet are thick with it. At the end of the play, everyone is internally begging for Juliet to wake up before Romeo poisons himself. Everyone in the audience knows the truth that she has only faked her death, but the characters—most heartbreakingly, Romeo—carry on unaware. We watch, holding out hope and begging for a resolution. We sit steeped in suspense until the conclusion. Sometimes a story will resolve cheerfully; sometimes, as in Juliet’s case, it ends tragically.
The desire for a resolution is what creates suspense. We’ve been let in on a secret; fully wrapped up in the story, we are watching with hope and anticipation, wishing for the secret to resolve—for the secret to be revealed to the characters involved.
Youth ministry can be an occupation full of secrets. Often those secrets are not resolved because they never are revealed to the people affected by them. Certainly, there are many secrets youth workers hold that should be kept in confidence, but there are also many unrevealed realities that would lead to a beneficial outcome were the secrets brought to light.
Knowing things about teenagers that their parents don’t know is an daily occurrence in the life of a youth worker. Youth workers find out about everything from secret crushes to hidden self-harm, from a propensity for lust to substance abuse, from academic struggles to doubts of faith. One of the vital parts of our calling is developing the ability to discern what can remain in confidence and what is our responsibility to work toward informing parents, counselors or others.
Frequently, youth workers learn things about parents that their sons and daughters don’t know. We have advance warnings about marital unrest and ensuing divorces. We sometimes hear from parents about their own troubled childhoods marked with a love of sin and rejection of God. We discern spiritual rebellion and a lack of conviction in the lives of our teenagers’ fathers and mothers, but often don’t have or take the opportunity to address it directly. Sometimes loving these parents well will mean wisely guiding secrets into the hands of other pastors or working collaboratively with parents to reveal to kids what’s happening in the hearts of their parents.
We don’t have the space to get into what we know about ourselves that we keep hidden from the families we shepherd. All of us have areas of sin we still struggle not to love and seasons of ebbs and flows in our walk with Christ that we don’t readily confess to others. This, too, is an area that needs wise discernment in what needs to be confessed openly and to whom.
To be the ministers we’ve been called to be, we constantly should be evaluating the hidden things we are detecting and deciding whether and how all the people involved would benefit from an outcome of secrets being brought to light. Many of the secrets we wade through, particularly with teenagers, will not resolve on their own. These veiled truths will require our intentional labor for a beneficial conclusion. Pray and work for resolutions in our families where sin and secrets can be confessed openly and our people can be loved in the revealing of unseen struggles. Please don’t leave us in the dark, steeped in suspense.
Adam Griffin is the husband of Chelsea Lane and the father of Oscar. He has been active in youth ministry for more than 15 years. Currently he serves as the Next Gen Minister at the Village Church in Dallas, Texas.
