On July 9 they began to turn their attention to how they can begin to heal the wounds that alienation causes. And the bottom line: they frequently cannot do it alone.
The willingness to take the risk to be vulnerable — to God and to others — is usually essential to recovery from brokenness, co-keynoters Jo Owens and Patrick Laney told the 1,300 high schoolers attending the conference under the theme “Throw Open the Doors.”
Quoting a main character in his favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird, Laney said, “Courage is knowing you’re going to get knocked down, but getting up anyway.” Young people need to know, he said, “that you may get knocked down by the swinging door, but know that God will open others, so
we are called to take risks, to step out in faith.”
Owens, who proclaimed herself “not a joke teller,” demonstrated what she said is the needed “vulnerability and risk,” by telling three jokes and asking the crowd to rate them. The winning joke: “Why does a chicken coop have only two doors? A: Because if it had four it would be a sedan.”
“It’s not that easy being open and vulnerable,” Owens said. “It takes a lot of courage because it’s scary. You never know what’s going to happen.”
Illustrating the point with a film clip from “13 Going on 30,” in which a teenager is granted a wish to “fast-forward” to when she is 30 and then finds herself disliking what she has become, Owens said, “We all realize at points that we can’t keep going the way we’re going for a variety of reasons. Sometimes we realize this on our own, sometimes we get the help we need.”
She recalled being told as a teenager by her mother, “she didn’t really like who I was, that there was so much more to me than what I was showing to the world.” Those words from her mother, Owens said, “were pretty devastating but also life-changing, so I started practicing being more open and honest and soon began to see the vision my mother saw of me. I don’t always succeed, but I’m trying and it took her to get me going.”
The Bible offers prime examples as well, Laney said, reading the story in Mark 2 of the paralytic’s friends cutting a hole in the roof in order to get him closer to Jesus and his healing power. “Sometimes we need someone to intervene for us, to help us in the struggle when we’re broken. Christ intervenes through others who can carry us until we’re able to walk on our own again.”
Laney showed a clip from “The Bucket List,” in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman portray strangers who become friends while being treated for cancer. The two set out to accomplish some of their long-held but unfulfilled goals in life — the bucket list — and in revealing their vulnerabilities to each other rediscover friendship and humanity.
Speaking at the funeral of his friend, Nicholson’s character says, “We saw the world together even though three months ago we didn’t even know each other. He saved my life and knew it before I did.”
Freeman’s character, in the closing scene of the film, responds: “When he died, his eyes were closed, but his heart was open.”
Vulnerability “can lead to betrayal, hatred, damage,” Laney
said. “But vulnerability in the right environment can be wonderful. “It takes a willingness to be vulnerable,” he concluded, “in order to be carried by Christ to healing.”
