Puppies (by Shauna Niequist)
I can’t think about the Shift Conference, or about Willow, or about student ministry without thinking of my small group. Eight years ago in Chicago, I began leading a small group of ten girls, which is a little bit oxymoronic, especially if you met these girls. There was nothing small about this group. Ten sophomore girls in one room multiply somehow, and you could swear there are a hundred of them. They were a blur of bright tank tops, flat-ironed hair, and Birkenstock clogs, and I always felt like I was in the middle of a tornado or a high-speed chase. To be honest, I planned to make it through one year and then quit, and find a new leader for them in the fall. But just before the summer, when I planned to quit, something happened. Something happened in me.
I began to love them, not because they were the finest, most-upstanding kids in our student ministry, because actually they weren’t. They had their moments of upstanding-ness, and they had moments of absolute insanity. I loved them because they were mine, because we were us, because of the funny and sweet and strange things they did and said.
In the last eight years, the eleven of us have lived together through first loves, breakups, parents’ divorces, parents’ weddings, one mother’s cancer, another mother’s death, an anxiety disorder, ADD, a learning disability, epilepsy, heartbreak, driver’s tests, SATs, one sister’s overdose, another sister’s suicide, and several funerals of friends. They threw me a wedding shower and put together our wedding programs and helped me throw my mom’s fiftieth birthday party. I went to their recitals and plays, and I watched them play powder-puff football, and helped them get ready for dates and cried with them over breakups and failed tests and college rejection letters.
When I think about how God made us to live, when people talk about true community or true intimacy, I think of them, this lovely, bizarre group of teenage girls who came over unannounced and never left when they were supposed to, who let me into their fears and their secrets, and cared about my fears and my secrets.
They taught me more than I ever taught them, and they gave me more than I ever gave them, and the best things they gave to me were ten gorgeous examples and all the permission in the world to love with that wide-open love, unmeasured and uncalculated, like a puppy in a box with all of her puppy-friends, right up close to them, feeling warm and safe.
Shauna Niequist is the author of Cold Tangerines, and will be teaching a breakout about storytelling and writing at the Shift Conference.
I began to love them, not because they were the finest, most-upstanding kids in our student ministry, because actually they weren’t. They had their moments of upstanding-ness, and they had moments of absolute insanity. I loved them because they were mine, because we were us, because of the funny and sweet and strange things they did and said.
In the last eight years, the eleven of us have lived together through first loves, breakups, parents’ divorces, parents’ weddings, one mother’s cancer, another mother’s death, an anxiety disorder, ADD, a learning disability, epilepsy, heartbreak, driver’s tests, SATs, one sister’s overdose, another sister’s suicide, and several funerals of friends. They threw me a wedding shower and put together our wedding programs and helped me throw my mom’s fiftieth birthday party. I went to their recitals and plays, and I watched them play powder-puff football, and helped them get ready for dates and cried with them over breakups and failed tests and college rejection letters.
When I think about how God made us to live, when people talk about true community or true intimacy, I think of them, this lovely, bizarre group of teenage girls who came over unannounced and never left when they were supposed to, who let me into their fears and their secrets, and cared about my fears and my secrets.
They taught me more than I ever taught them, and they gave me more than I ever gave them, and the best things they gave to me were ten gorgeous examples and all the permission in the world to love with that wide-open love, unmeasured and uncalculated, like a puppy in a box with all of her puppy-friends, right up close to them, feeling warm and safe.
Shauna Niequist is the author of Cold Tangerines, and will be teaching a breakout about storytelling and writing at the Shift Conference.
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