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web 2.0 suicide: are your students on the digital ledge?

The term social suicide is one that has been around for awhile. I looked up the most popular definition on The Urban Dictionary and this is the one that rose to the top:

SOCIAL SUICIDE: commiting an act or acts that alienates one from their social scene or social circleto kill one’s social life

Example: John commited social suicide by asking out his ex-girlfriends best friend barely a week after they broke up.Example: Veronica is commiting social suicide by talking behind her friends backs.

One of the recent movies to delve into this subject of the birth and death of a social status is mean girls.  It’s fascinating to see what someone will do to rise to popularity.  Once the heroine battles her way up the chain, we begin to see that it’s inevitable when she will take a fall and when she does, she falls all the way below even the rejects of society. Interestingly enough, she realizes the stress and strain of maintaining her status and in the end lives in peace with playing the role she should have stayed with. She commits social suicide and becomes a mathlete and acknowledges that she even enjoys hanging out with the social rejects.  Social suicide…it’s an interesting concept.  And now, the term has found it’s way into the virtual social landscape.
For those people that can’t keep up with their web 2.0 status and constant digital chatter, they can commit social suicide via the suicidemachine.org.   It’s a site that literally allows those who have had enough with their digital social shadow to pull the plug, stand on the ledge and leap, say sianara…adios…hasta la vista…and pull the trigger on their online life story in a matter of an hour.  Now granted, you used to be able to “dismember” all your social networks including Facebook, but recently suicidemachine.org has reported that facebook has blocked their IP address.  However FB couldn’t stop the suicides on facebook from 500 people affecting over 50,000 friends. So now you can only delete your facebook profile, although if you re-engage you’ll see that your profile gets resuscitated immediately with no visible wounds or scars. However, you can still kill your other social identities on networks like NING, TWITTER, etc.
So my question,  what does this mean for students who are having to commit social web suicide because they can’t handle the pressure?  Social networking has come onto the scene so quickly that students often times feel the need to put everything out there about themselves in a desire to get social feedback instantly.  When that feedback or constant pressure to be connected begins to wear on them…they may make the decision to choose social suicide.  It’s important to help students know boundaries in this weird online social cafeteria of sorts.
Here are some helpful tips to get your started should you have the opportunity to talk with students about boundaries on the social networks:
  • Create online hours and offline hours—-one of my friends wrote on the pillows of our senior girls last year this quote that stayed in my mind forever—“Nothing good happens after midnight”.  That goes for the internet and even begins earlier…don’t go on the networks past 10.  Often times you start posting things or saying things that you would not want to be said and those comments can’t be erased very easily.
  • Take some digital breaks each week — If you begin to feel like your online presence is becoming demanding or even addictive, begin to schedule digital breaks or sabbaths.  Tell someone or even post in your status that you are “off this week” or “this day”.  Don’t let your profile or status own you.
  • Consider the legacy… It’s hard to believe that a digital presence could cause havoc on your physical presence but it can. Your digital fingerprint leaves a legacy…think about what your profile will say when you begin to try and shake it, or change it.

What other boundaries do you have or tell your students to think about when they are online? Share them below.

CLICK FOR SOURCE ARTICLE

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cool idea for an after school activity

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I’m always looking for some creative activities to do with girls at our retreats or to pass on to lifegroup leaders. I stumbled across this recipe at skiptomylou.org Go there for the wonderful pictures. I cut and paste the recipe here. I think this would be a fun activity for a slumber party or a retreat weekend. The possibilities of gummy candy is endless:) Hope someone can use this idea.

Homemade Gummi Candy recipe!

All we needed was 1 -3 oz box of flavored gelatin and 2 – 1/4 oz packages of unflavored gelatin, water and candy molds. (we used two candy molds)

Place 1/3 cup water in a small sauce pan. Sprinkle the Jello and unflavored gelatin over the water. Let sit 5 – 10 minutes. (If you like chewier gummi candy add in another packet of unflavored gelatin.)

Place sauce pan over medium heat and stir until gelatin is dissolved, about 2-5 minutes. When mixture is liquid and all gelatin has dissolved, remove from heat. Let cool a minute and then pour into a container that is easy to pour from. I use a small ceramic creamer pitcher.

Fill molds. If you save the inside of the advent calendar for projects like do, it works perfect! The sheet of star molds worked a bit better than the bears because they are a bit deeper. However, I must say we were just needing an activity so our standards were pretty low— we thought they all turned out great!

Allow to cool completely, about 20 minutes. They may be placed in a refrigerator for about 10 minutes if the kids are eager.

Once cool, the backs can be lightly dusted with corn starch, if desired.

Peel the gummi candy out of the molds. Don’t be shy, you won’t hurt them when peeling them from the molds. No need to oil the molds!

Enjoy!
Make homemade stickers with the unused unflavored gelatin packets.

Notes: we  felt the blue ones weren’t flavorful enough. Next time we will try 2 boxes Jello, 3 packages of unflavored gelatin and 1/2 cup water.

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What’s the Skinny On Dieting and Teen’s Bones?

 

I want to call our attention to something that is not surprising but perhaps may allow us to present a wake-up call to our daughters and those we mentor. I’m wary of posting this on girlsminister.com because I do not want to see this article create panic and then cause girls ministries to hold retreats that make girls take the Presidential fitness test or something crazy like that.  I am putting this in the toolbox though to help you have your eyes open to the individual conversations that allow you to speak into a girls heart that may be struggling with dieting.

This is a conversation we should have with girls who have let us know they are trying to lose weight for this new year.  With all the ads, marketing, and poor modeling they have seen from the women in their lives…I don’t think many girls know what healthy living even looks like.  I do not use the word dieting—because it comes with a lot of baggage.  Our daughters and the girls we mentor need to know a quick fad diet may give them immediate results but they are actually harming themselves for their future.  I recently read an article from Los Angeles Times and from The UK press that stated:

Professor Jon Tobias, leader of the research, says: “There is a good deal of pressure on teenage girls to be thin, but they need to be aware that this could endanger their developing skeleton and put them at increased risk of osteoporosis.

Click here for the full article

“Puberty is an important time of bone growth… thickness of the bone is still continuing to develop,” Tobias said. It’s also the time when girls start dieting to control weight and cease to engage in rigorous physical activity, Tobias said — a dangerous combination.

With all of the pressure to be a size 1 or 0, I’m afraid girls do not realize that they may be doing great damage to their bodies just so they can fit within a size.  There’s loads of articles that support this, but this one just caught my attention today.  So what do we do to help girls know how to eat and excercise healthy?   A teen girl needs to eat differently than an adult because they are still growing.  We need to help girls understand that while the mirror tells them one story, the nutrition they are putting into their bodies or not putting into their bodies may be telling a different story in their bones and muscles.  If they start uttering the words—diet, ask them if they are doing any excercise.  If they say no, ask them if you can help them figure out some healthy ways to living that help them to move away from dieting.  Let’s learn healthy living and take dieting out of our vocabulary. Besides anything that has the word “die” in it isn’t a place we want to focus right?  Let’s focus on little changes that we can do for a lifetime…and not a fad diet that we do for a weekend.   Help the girls that are in your life that may be living dangerously in these areas not to eliminate food, but to evaluate the types of food they are putting into their body and the amount of movement their bodies are getting each week.  and remember—pray that these conversations will lead you to the root of the issue that is prompting these body image problems. Remember to be cautious about what words are coming out of your own mouth regarding your body.  They could be taking their cues from you.  If it is a struggle for some of the girls you are with, commit to pray about it together. With this said—I am not a health expert nor a nutritionist. If there are girls that are struggling addicts with food and excercise, you need to make sure they are finding help.

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2010 Girls Ministry Forum For Leaders and Girls

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I’m excited to be leading a conference for the Girls Ministry Forum at Lifeway in February 26-27. I would love to take some students and leaders from our church with me.  If you are interested in attending, let me know.  If you don’t go to Brentwood Baptist and are interested—you need to be there. I know Shelley Johnson is a great worship leader—not to mention there are some other great conference leaders to help facilitate some great conversations if you are wanting encouragement as a leader who works with girls or if you are a student leader. That’s the neat thing about this event—it’s for both adult leaders and girls who are leaders to their peers.  So I hope that you will make it a priority to be in Nashville for this event.  Click on the link below to register or if you are a Brentwood Baptist leader…send me an email or reply to this post and we’ll see if we can get a group together.

Lifeway Girls Ministry Forum

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Our featured artist gets a spot on Threadsmedia.com

Several months ago, we introduced you to Sara Beth and her songs.  She’s continuing to be involved in some new projects. Keep your eyes on the lookout for this one, and get to know her a little bit better. She’s an amazing worship leader! P.S Sara Beth…are you available for Snowball this year—it’s March 5-7.

Sara Beth Geoghegan EPK from Jeff Venable on Vimeo.

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Happy New Year: Girlsminister.com gets an upgrade!

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That’s right…the above picture is a splice of the new toolbar that is embedded on girlsminister.com.  This plugin allows readers to talk with each other and engage with girlsminister.com in ways we’ve not been able to do before.  Some of the features you need to check out:

  • Click on the Translate button and see what the site looks like in any of the 11 languages available.
  • Click on facebook community. This is one feature I am very excited about. When you use facebook connect, you can stay on the site and utilize facebook to talk with readers from girlsminister.com in a very cool way.
  • In addition, we will be using twitter and facebook to announce when we will be live chatting from the site.  You can check out the chat room by clicking on Join Chat.

So many new ways to connect! We’re very excited that now this site can offer some immediate ways for the community to talk straight from this site. Of course you will want to join mygirlsministry.com for more indepth networking features.  mygirlsministry.com offers a real time e-store and the first girls ministry social network for those who work with teen girls and their families.  It’s free so if you enjoy the networking here….make sure to check it out!  Oh and Happy New Year!

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Pixable: Your Girls Ministry’s best friend for memory keeping

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It’s amazing how facebook has revolutionized our ability to save, comment on, celebrate, and keep in touch with memories through the facebook photo tagging abilities.  I know that within hours of an event, I have instant feedback from our students and leaders as they upload their photos to photo albums on facebook and tag me in on the fun.  Sometimes this can be my worst nightmare as we try to educate our students about what should be uploaded and what should not. However, today I just want to live in a naive world and pretend that all pictures are good pictures. You with me?  So wouldn’t it be great to somehow have tangible albums that can be printed off, even passed out the week after an event?  Let me introduce you to Pixable!  It’s pretty simple.      You have all the photographers (ie your students and leaders) now here’s how you can aggregate those into an amazing memory book or calendar.  Image the possibilities! Meet your new best scrapbooking friend. I can’t explain it better then them…so here is Pixable.com!

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Praying for and with parents

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Recently I have had the great honor of praying with some moms that mean a lot to me, and listening to them lift their daughters up to God in prayer.  As I participated in one such prayer time with a mom, it made me think—I need to make more time for this.  I regularly schedule time to talk with girls and disciple them.  I work on events to help bring them together and fellowship. I try to regularly encourage and follow up with leaders that lead our girls…but a regular time to pray with moms of the girls…that hasn’t been top on my list as a girls minister.   One thing that may escape our ministry strategies are prayer partnerships with the parents of the girls we minister to.  There are moms I am now partnering with to pray for their prodigal daughters.  It’s important for us as girls ministers to remember that moms need prayer too, and they need encouragement, and how amazing is it when the church and home connect to lift up a unified purpose to Christ in prayer?  I think that’s why I know without a shadow of a doubt that He truly is Immanuel when “two or more are gathered in prayer”.  Below is a Parent’s Prayer as seen in Janet Thompson’s book: Praying for your Prodigal daughter. It’s a great book and has 40 days of scriptural prayers in the back.  I am so thankful for some mothers who have daughters in our student ministry and have allowed me to pray with and for them.  They are the primary Girlsminister for their daughter…and they need our prayers.

A MOTHER’S PRAYER:

Is there anyplace my daughter can go to avoid Your Spirit?
To be out of Your sight?
If she climbs to the sky, You’re there!
If she goes underground, You’re there!
If she flew on morning’s wings
to the far western horizon,
You’d find her in a minute—–
You’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, He even sees her in the dark!
At night she’s immersed in the light!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to You;
nigh and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to You.
Oh yes, You shaped my daughter first inside, then out;
You formed her in her mother’s womb.
I thank You, High God—You’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, she is marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know her inside and out,
You know every bone in her body,
You know exactly how she was made, bit by bit,
how she was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like and open book, You watched her grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of her life were spread out before You,
The days of her life all prepared
before she’d even lived one day.

Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful!
God, I’ll never comprehend them!
I couldn’t even begin to count them—
any more than I could count the sand of the sea.
Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with You!
And please, God, do away with wickedness for good!

PERSONALIZATION OF PSALM 139:12-19 MSG as seen in Janet Thompson’s Praying for your prodigal daughter.

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Developing the art of conversation and listening

“They don’t listen to me!”  This is a statement I hear over and over again from teen girls.  How do you develop the art of listening to a teen girl?  It’s different than how it was when they were younger.  Girls have a lot of words don’t they?  It’s one reason I have loaded “Spinvox” onto my voicemail so that when I receive a call from a girl, their voicemail is transcribed into text. That way I see all the words, and can piece the situation together.  Sometimes they don’t talk at all.  Sometimes they do that because they know the question you are going to ask them already. It’s a routine conversation…and they hate routine conversations. If we’re honest—we do too!  We can almost verbatim know the flow of this conversation because we’ve heard it before:  “How was school?”   teen: “It was okay”  Parent: “What did you do”  teen: “nothing really”  Parent: “What did you eat?”and I’m shutting this conversation down because it is already snoozing us all.  The parent was asking routine questions, seeing if all the necessities were covered.  The teen was just going through the motions…but what happens when you ask the right question and listen actively?  A conversation may be born!

My mother is the super-hero of active listening. She doesn’t understand why people go to her to talk to this day. She doesn’t understand why when I was in highschool, most of my girlfriends and I would end up where she was. One time that was when she was cleaning the bathroom. We all sat in the floor of the bathroom and talked with her while she cleaned. Why?  Because we knew she listened to us…really listened.  I never knew what she would ask next. It was a real conversation.  So here are some tips to throw those routine conversations out the door:

1. Remember things that they are working on and work those into conversations.  It shows you are observing and caring about their world.  Resist the urge to judge. Example: “Hey Abby, last week you said something about Carly quitting the cheerleading squad, how is she doing? ”  The response could be: She’s okay.  If so, ask how the dynamics of the squad are changing because she quit.

2.Ask questions to gain insight into the “ROOT”.   So you think Emily is being mean-girled at school?  That must be hard to be her friend with all that going on. How are you coping with that?  WHY do you think the girls are acting that way towards Emily? WHAT do you think you would do if you were her?

3.Create a place of conversation.  My mom was stationed at the kitchen table after dinner to read the newspaper or do a cross word puzzle. She was always on her feet but after dinner, this is where she was.  I knew her patterns. This is where I would hang to work on my homework. It wasn’t a place where forced conversation happened.  If I wanted to talk, she was there.

4. LISTEN.  Do more listening than talking.  There are 4 main reasons we listen

We listen to obtain information.
We listen to understand.
We listen for enjoyment.
We listen to learn.

People remember 25-50% of what we hear.  So when you spend your time with your daughter lecturing them for 10 minutes, they may only hear about 2 minutes of your speech before they tune you out.  However, they will take away much more if they feel listened to by you.  This is a LOUD way of telling them you love them and building that relationship.

This is just a start…other thoughts to share from parents or girls ministry leaders?

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4 experiments to break parents out of a love language rut

I had the opportunity to listen to some girls recently.  They shared that they heard their parents say they loved them, but their actions weren’t matching up.  It made me think that perhaps those parents were getting into a love rut with their student.  What’s a love rut? It’s like a tractor rut. A tractor rut is a well-worn and deep path where the tractor has crushed the ground underneath and it would take lots of dirt to fill in the gaping path.  I think sometimes it’s possible to only demonstrate our love in a certain way to students that they get so used to it that it doesn’t even look like love to them anymore.  Talk with your parents in your girls ministry and see if they would be willing to break some routine and move out of a love rut into a love trampoline. Hang with me 🙂

1. write a short note to your daughter and lay it on her pillow before she goes to bed with a piece of chocolate. (words of affirmation/encouragement)

2. buy her a pair of fun socks and put them on her bed along with the verse Isaiah 52:7. (gifts)

3. Schedule a Saturday for you both to go serve at your local homeless shelter together and then take her for a snack break to talk about all that you experienced. Make a rule that you can’t talk about home issues or school issues…  (Quality time)

4. Surprise her when she comes home from school by setting up a nail station where you are serving as her personal nail technician.  For mothers and daughters that struggle with the love language of personal touch…this is a great starting activity as it allows you to hold her hand as you paint her nails.  You may want to provide a book of “Would you ever” questions to help with conversation during this opportunity.

These are just 4 ideas for parents to get out of their love language rut and show their daughter they love them in a new, fresh way. They are dying to hear those words, and they may just be tuned out because it has become routine for them to see them.