You know what time of year it is. Steubenville time. Believe it or not, next weekend is the annual Steubenville on the Bayou Catholic youth conference. If you are unfamiliar with the conference, roughly 3,000 teens gather from all over the south (Texas, Louisiana, those other states) for a conference that is centered on Jesus in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. It’s an extremely powerful weekend and to be honest, to describe it more correctly, I would say it is a supernatural weekend, out of this world if you will (pun intended?). The purpose is to tell young people about God, and not just tell them, but also to give them God in His fullness, awakening their faith. Despite so much greatness flowing from a conference center in the very beautiful (real) bayou city of Houma, Louisiana, over the years I have heard some things that have made me think and question.
This year will be my 6th conference. When I was 16 years old and at the very early stages of beginning a destructive path in my life, I found myself sitting on a bus with a ton of other teens I didn’t know on my way to Steubenville. Extremely long story short, when I made it back home that Sunday, my life had been completely transformed. It’s not that I was a bad kid by any means, but in no way had I been fully alive.
Being apart of the conference for so long, I have seen a great number of beautiful things. Most of which cannot be described. However, two things I have heard over the years at the conference and after the conference are the terms “experience” and “spiritual high.” Dun Dun Dun!! These are two things that always catch my attention and always leave me with questions. If I can be very honest with you, I really dislike them. You see, as I said, the conference is based around the very person of Jesus Christ and having a relationship with Him, it’s based around prayer and worship, and the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist (in Adoration and in the Holy Mass). When people describe Steubenville as an “experience,” it seems as if they are describing it as a one-time deal. By definition an experience is an event or occurrence that leaves an impression on someone. Yes, Steubenville is an event, because it is only once a year, but you see, the conference itself is not what is making the impact on thousands of teenagers’ lives. It’s Jesus who is meeting teens where they are and transforming their hearts, and in no way is Jesus an event, but instead, a way of life. So my prayer for everyone who will be attending the conference this year is that they wouldn’t just have an experience of God but that they would come to have a real, genuine, and lasting relationship with the living God.
Coming from a Steubenville conference you will hear over and over again the phrase “spiritual high.” Teens go to this conference in whatever state of life they’re in and by the end of it they are new creations in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). But they describe their new state of life as a high, as if Steubenville is some sort of Jesus drug. However, when you describe leaving the conference with a high, it means one thing, which a vast majority of the teens don’t realize at the time, is that there is eventually going to be a crash. The reality is that you can’t live the Steubenville “spiritual high” forever, because when you get home, life is going to happen and it will get tough. So my prayer for everyone who will be attending the conference is that his or her “spiritual high” would not just be a high, but that it would be transformed into a desire for everything that is of God. And if we can turn away from “high” and move to desire, when life gets tough 2 or 3 weeks after the conference and the fuzzy feelings are gone, we wouldn’t question the reality of what happened or think back to that great experience we had as if it is just something in the past, but we would want to turn to God even more as we desire Him in everything that we do.
Out with experience and high, in with lasting relationship and the desire for it.
