After The Day Has Gone

This past Sunday, I was chatting with the worship team at my church during our team breakfast. One of the girls was talking about her plans to go to Australia to attend Bible College there for music ministry. Our youth pastor Blair then related a story about a friend of his that did much the same thing. Upon his return from Bible College and his entrance into the "real world," Blair's friend became disillusioned and within two years he had left church altogether.

Blair said that he had numerous examples of situations like this with other people that he knew from Bible College. I've seen similar effects on people as they return from missionary work, or finish university, or move to a new city, or change to a new church. There does seem to be a fairly common pattern.

I don't know if it's just a depression that kicks in or what. Looking back, I think that I experienced something similar when I first moved to London from Wawa. For my first two years, I hung out almost exclusively with Mike and we didn't do much of anything besides eat pizza, watch movies and play video games. Eventually we both got out of that rut but maybe that time shows the true effect that losing all of my old friends had on me. It's so easy to become reclusive and shut everyone out of our lives. No expectations, no rules, no explanations.

Part of this effect also seems to relate to the fact that we're immersed in a certain kind of culture for so long. With missionary work or something like YWAM, we're always with other Christians and we have frequent prayer and ministry. With university or college, we're surrounded by friends with similar interests and we're lumped together for years at a time. Coming out of those kinds of environments can be quite the culture shock.

More than that, it's easy to become disillusioned when we come out of this idealistic or close-knit group, or come out long periods of running solo. Other places and other people just don't match up to what we had before. People don't seem to be as caring because they care about other things. Churches seem to have the wrong priorities and the wrong leadership. Friends seem to be superficial and family seems to be too intrusive. In response, we shut ourselves down and ditch it all. We no longer attend church, we refuse to see friends, we set up other priorities as excuses.

For me, it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one that has gone through this. It's also quite the cautionary tale, to understand that people I care about may be going through the same kind of thing for whatever reason. Everybody needs somebody sometime...right?