Crabs and Incarnation

(June 15, 2015 Youth mission trip to Bayou la Batre, AL - Miami Shores Presbyterian Church)

They're never the most Biblically knowledgable. They mumble through the songs and take frequent bathroom trips when it's question and answer time. They slip and swear in ways other groups never do. They break every rule listed in the clothing policy (which I've declared is a sexist and elitist document to justify its breaking). But I wouldn't trade this youth group for any other.

I don't know if it's their upbringing in a city like Miami. I don't know if it has something to do with their love of one another, this church, and me. But there's an incarnational kind of theology within them them allows them not to necessarily know, but to be.

This time I was reminded of this because of hermit crabs.

They found these crabs on the shore in Bayou la Batre, AL, and wanted to keep them. I said no, but didn't have to argue. They understood. You can't take crabs from the shore, they'll die.

We returned to camp, only to discover another group had taken a crab from that same shore, the biggest they could find.

Our entire group leaned forward in their chairs or stood, alert now that a wrong had been done. "Well, what are you going to do with the crabs?" my youth asked, hopeful that this other group had come up with a solution we had not thought of, that would allow them to keep these funny little creatures.

"Oh, we're just going to put them in a bucket of bleach so they'll die and we can keep their shells...."

Before I could react to this interestingly awful pronouncement, the youth had. Out of their chairs, yelling all at once.

"NO!"

"You can't do that!"

"You're a crab murderer!"

Whoa. We don't know all the songs. We're a little confused as to who Nicodemus is. But don't hurt those hermit crabs.

The other kids decided to put them in an empty Pringles can, with air holes, and keep them safe and alive until they could get home and build them a tank. (Did they have another option with 18 youth from Miami naming them murderers?!) But I knew those crabs wouldn't make it all week. Sure enough, on our last night at camp, I hear the question you don't want to hear when laying in a sleeping bag on the floor - "Has anyone seen the hermit crabs?!"

A giggle arose from my girls next to me. Somewhere, sometime, they had freed the crabs. 

I'd pick these foul-mouthed, policy-breaking, humming-instead-of-singing, crab-saving youth any day. And I think Christ calls us, in this strange call of youth ministry, to do more crab-saving than neat and orderly teaching anyway. There are lots of buckets of bleach in this world, lurking to strip our young ones of their incarnation. Perhaps youth ministry is a call to not let it.