Lessons Learned on the 9th Grade Retreat

Last week, I got recruited, or drafted, depending on how you look at it, into chaperoning the 9th grade retreat. It's a huge affair, bigger this year than ever before because of a huge influx of freshmen, over 200 in the class of 2023. This creates a whole lot of positive changes, but also some logistical challenges when it comes to getting all these students onto buses, sorted into cabins, and escorted all over campgrounds to participate in outdoors activities. Just to paint a picture of what we were dealing with, imagine 9th graders out in the countryside of Umatilla, Florida, shooting bows and arrows for the first time. The thing is, I don't actually teach 9th grade, so if I knew any of these kids, it was purely by accident.

The theme of the retreat was "Trust" - trust in God, primarily, but also venturing out of your clique and trusting other peers to be good friends, trusting teachers and administration to have your best interests at heart, and trusting your family for unconditional love. Every activity had a lesson attached, and, while I'm not sure how many of those lessons found a home in the hearts of those kids, I know that I learned some valuable lessons over the course of those three days.

1) I learned that 9th grade boys are like squirrels who got into a cocaine stash, and then decided to go on a pub crawl that ended with a tasting tour of all of Starbucks most caffeinated beverages. The decision-making processes are bizarre, and everything is a competition. Sometimes it's healthy competition, like who can row the canoe fastest, or clear the most tables after lunch, or hit the farthest targets with an arrow. Often it's terribly unhealthy and immature conversations, like who can push someone into the most people in line for food, who can make the biggest ball out of brownies, and who can make the loudest noise with bodily functions after 11 pm. That last one had a clear and uncontested winner. I got so fed up that I had to look inward and ask myself if I was like that at that age. I think I may have either blocked out those days, or revised them in my memory, because I don't remember being that annoying. On the other hand, I did get beat up a lot, so I must have been getting under someone's skin.

2) The difference in maturity between freshman boys ad freshman girls is large enough to be incalculable. While the boys are trying to see who can poke each other in the eye first, the girls are off to the side trying to make Tik-Tok videos of themselves dancing and building friendships that will last a lifetime, or until they like the same boy. At the very least, the girls are manageable. They may not want to try all of the activities, but there were a lot more adventurous ones than I thought there would be, even if they did squeal about everything in nature. Speaking of nature, many female eyes were rolled at the boys acting like black-footed albatrosses in their mating dances, trying to attract the girls attention with the limited social tool kit that their short life experience has amassed. One pair of real bachelors tipped a canoe full of girls right into the brackish lake by repeatedly ramming them, after repeated warnings from both me and the lake master on his rescue boat. They were utterly surprised that they didn't get a round of laughs and the coveted "snap."

3) For all of the bravado and risky behavior of the boys, for all of their annoying silliness and inexplicable decisions, these kids have problems. When the time came for the boys and girls to split, and the real heart to heart discussion began about what it means to be a man, what it means to trust God and people, what types of things bother or challenge them, it started out with some of the boys repeating the school talking points, but evolved into a mass confessional. There were boys stepping forward, in front of about a hundred of their peers, and opening up about their lives. Some of these boys are dealing with their parents' divorcing, and knowing all of the illicit details of the breakup. They've lost respect for their fathers because of infidelity, or their mothers for the same. They've lost loved ones to the ugliest diseases, and this after they've been told all their lives that God loves them and wants the best for them. Some of them feel farthest away from God at a time in their lives when they should feel His love all around them, almost physically, attending a Christian school, involved in church, literally surrounded by Christian teachers and counselors. They're just entering their high school years with a heightened sensitivity to the competition and pressure to perform flawlessly at school, often in the overwhelming shadow of very successful and wealthy parents. Some of them are cutting themselves and having suicidal ideation. They're like little islands of depression and anxiety in a sea of Christian love. 

The encouraging thing about the whole experience, the jewel of hope in all of that despair and angst, was watching that huge group of boys rally around each kid that got up and shared, and cried, and broke down as he spilled his secret shames and fears. While a boy was talking, they were quieter and more attentive than I had seen them all weekend, with a focus that I didn't think was possible for them, and when he was finished, they practically leaped out of their seats to form group hugs around him. All of the crassness and unfounded bravado they had exuded all day dissipated, and instead they showed love with abandon. They connected through their pain and worry and supported each other like brothers. After hours of being frustrated and annoyed with them, this one experience showed me that they have the capacity for maturity, even if they don't always tap into it when it's convenient for me.

At the end of the three day retreat, after hours in the sun on the lake, after what seemed like an eternity in the biting cold evening with the wrong attire, and after a 5 hour return trip, I stepped off the bus back on campus four pounds lighter from avoiding camp food the entire time, with sunburn on some weird overlooked places, lips chapped and splitting, and a sleep debt of about 65%. But I also came back with an understanding of what these wild boys are going through every day, and what their antics are meant to hide from the rest of us. I came back with a mission to pray for them and to look more closely for opportunities to offer a word of encouragement and hope, even if I have to force it through a veneer of annoying behavior.

In Defense of Therapy

When I was separated from my first wife, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want the church to know. I was a deacon, after all - things like this shouldn’t happen to me. I worked at a Christian school connected to my church, so telling someone at work would have been the same as telling someone at church, we were all basically the same staff then. I somehow had hope that this would all go away, so I didn’t tell my friends, out of some stupid fear that it would cause problems once this marriage was back on track. The only person I told was my sister, and, like the crusader she is, she booked the first flight from Minneapolis to Miami and got herself involved, talking to me, talking to my ex-wife, suggesting books and videos and all kinds of resources. It didn’t do any good for the marriage in the long run, but at least I had someone on my team. And telling just one person made me bold enough to get some actual, professional help. I found a marriage counselor, made an appointment, and asked my ex-wife to come with me, or if she couldn't make it, to let me know when to reschedule the appointment.

The counselor I went to was a great man, who was not only licensed in marriage and family counseling, but also held a law degree, and he was able to give me great advice on pretty much every aspect of what I was going through. Better yet, he had an honest and blunt, but caring, demeanor, like Dr. Phil. I still watch that show regularly today, like I did back then, and there was something about the similarity that made me feel like I had picked the right person. He was direct, sometimes harsh with me, in a way that men can be with other men and still have respect and even love for each other. That first session, I came in prepared with all kinds of documents and information, and he dismissed all of it and spent the hour getting my head right about what was happening. The statistics for a marriage ending in reconciliation after separation, he said, were astronomically slim, almost infinitesimal. He had never personally seen it happen, after decades of practice. That cut me pretty deep, since I thought that I was really pulling out the big guns just by signing up. In light of that fact, he suggested that I reassess my goals. He said that it was okay if my number one goal was reconciliation, but that if it was my only goal, this would probably only end in destruction, when there were other ways to win in this situation. By the end of the session, we had come up with three goals that I was most focused on achieving, and all of them equal in importance. First, reconciliation of the marriage, and improvement on it, instead of going back to the same thing. One question that he asked, that I genuinely hadn’t thought of in all of my desperation, was that if she were to walk back through the door when I got home, and declare her intent to never leave again, but our living together was as bad as it had ever been, would I consider that a win? I had to agree that it wasn’t, and that I didn’t want to live that way. The second goal was the create stability and safety for my kids, to protect them and nurture them as much as possible through whatever was coming next. The third goal was mental and emotional health for myself. In the end, I couldn’t achieve all of those goals, but two out of three ain’t bad.

Another thing we established in that first meeting was that I had to focus on what was best for my children. Their mother was already talking about splitting up the week and creating a custody arrangement, even though she had just moved out, and no divorce papers had been filed. My counselor cautioned me that this was a bad idea - bad for the children, as well as a further hindrance in any kind of reconciliation. He advised me to protect them and protect myself, that she might want to make a lot of changes, and that she might even ask me for help in certain things. His advice was not to help her with any money or any other thing that would make this separation easier for her or would put my stamp of approval on it. Let her feel the separation from me and everything that it entailed, before she made up her mind to divorce. As for the children, she could definitely have time with them, obviously, but the idea of changing their home and shaking up their lives in such a dramatic way was out of the question. I agreed totally with the logic of his advice, but I was weak at the time, and probably had not been good at asserting myself with her in the first place. However, the idea of causing harm to my kids overrode any of those fears. Ultimately, I followed his advice, mostly, and I heard about it from him when I didn't follow it. It didn't save my marriage, but it saved my dignity and sanity, and it saved my kids from a lot more stress and confusion. They eventually came to some of the sessions with me , even though their mom never did.

If you’re going through this kind of stretch in your marriage, where one or both of you are talking divorce, where there are real problems like adultery or abuse or addiction, my advice, based on both research and experience, is to get the right people involved. Don’t go around telling everybody, but tell somebody, or, more importantly, tell the right somebody. Tell your best friends, tell your pastor, get a counselor on board, but don’t keep it to yourself. If you’re under the impression that keeping it a secret is going to make it more likely to just blow over or fizzle out, you’re wrong. There really isn’t any problem that I can think of that gets better through neglect. If you think that you can handle it on your own, you can’t. If you could, then your marriage wouldn’t be falling apart, would it? On the other hand, if you think that getting people involved is a guaranteed solution to a failing marriage, you’re probably wrong about that, too. But it’s not really about saving the marriage at some point. Living with the pressure of infidelity or impending divorce or abuse, and living with it alone, with no help or comfort or counsel from the outside, could literally kill you. For me, those times were lonely because of a wife who had completely checked out and abandoned me, but lonelier because I had to go through it every day, in front of students, colleagues, parents, church members, and friends, as if nothing was wrong and my life wasn’t falling apart and my kids weren’t crying themselves to sleep at night. If that’s the situation you find yourself in, then get people involved. Even if it doesn’t save the marriage, which, statistically, it probably won’t, it will more than likely save your mental health, and maybe even save your life.