Peter Pan Syndrome?

Increasingly, Larry and Susan have noticed a disturbing tendency among young men from the jail and juvenile center. Susan has named it the “Peter Pan Syndrome” and it is characterized by a movement in the under 30 crowd to choose to remain forever juvenile. This is the subculture in America that shocks us in the news and fills the welfare roles, straining the system to the limit.

Sex is a pastime and babies are a notch in the belt that is notched midway down the buttocks. Drugs are both a high and a means to earn money to keep the fun rolling. Cash comes quick and easy. Unskilled labor jobs that come and go fill in the hours before or after the party. Girls are always available for a little crack. Macho displays of violence erupt periodically only to simmer down after the adrenaline rush is over. Tattoos ripple over proud muscles and piercings protrude anywhere from the eyebrow down to the belly button. No one knows what RESPONSIBILITY means, let alone how to spell it.

Even the vocabulary, borrowed from gangs that we don't even want to mention, reflects the Peter Pan mentality of “I Don't Wanna Grow Up!” The young males with adult bodies and fourteen year old minds strut around parking lots and inner city Medina streets calling each other “their boy” or “their home boy” or “their homey.” They would say that they love each other. They “chill” together and everything is “tight.” They protect one another, counsel one another…and when one of them dies, they salute the fallen with their unspoken motto, “Live by the streets, die by the streets.”

Girls get passed around. No big deal. The male bond is stronger than the girl/boy relationship. The males hang together with their little groupies of girls (or women). Babies most often get raised by the grandparents who have finally gotten too old to have a drug/alcohol problem anymore. They are finally ready to parent emotionally, but too tired physically and maybe, too poor financially to pull the whole thing off and rescue the next generation.

These are men who have watched their parents, perhaps former hippies, blow it big time. They have seen it all by the time they are ten or twelve (the free love, the domestic violence, the obscenities, the bitter divorce, the bail bondsman for the dad, etc. etc.) They have seen it all. Families don't work. Church is boring and irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the group, the “home boys.” They all know what it feels like to be rejected, abandoned, and abused. They all share the same deep anger and hostility toward anything that smacks of adulthood and authority. And God has become a vague, shadowy Star Wars-type alien who causes all the pain.

Gentle, middle class Americans cannot begin to comprehend where these men/children are coming from. They can't believe that our culture has shifted from duty and honor, to entitlement and illegality. The music is irritating and ugly-hearted. The tattoo art is demonic.

What has happened? The back alley has become a main street affair and no one has a clue.

Is there an answer? Is there a clear cut program that will transfer the angry, rebellious into the compliant, satisfied? Can America regain the moral ground it lost in the sixties and seventies? Can a new generation rise up and reclaim dignity, truth, and justice? When children are having children, who can protect any of them? Who will fix it and who will pay the bills?

These are really big questions, that deserve really big answers. It is not enough to offer a 10 minute gospel presentation and throw in a free pizza. After the hoopla, the youths settle back into their same old, same old. After they prayed “the prayer” they still go home to their drunken mom, the trashed house, the school books they can't read and the authority figures who shake their heads. The only comfort is back to the drugs (Ecstasy sounds like it will work, right?” Sex is a release…for a while.)

The next time they hear the gospel message, they ask why “the prayer” didn't work for them? God ends up looking just like their dead-beat dad. A lot of promises and no performance. More rejection. Why on earth would anyone want the Lord?

Why would anyone want to grow up?

The answer is short for these young men, but it isn‘t simple. LOVE. God says that He is love. The world is supposed to see Him through the love His followers display. The Bible may be infallible and filled with the wisest of wisdom and knowledge, but these Peter Pan men are never going to read it, if we don't first show them the very thing they have lacked and longed for in the first place. LOVE. The author of the Bible is all about Love. But they don't know that. How could they?

The gospel isn't about the pizza, it's not about games, it's not about reading, it's not about a prayer either. It's about love. God reaching down to man in an ultimate sacrificial love that wipes away tears, arguments, objections, and bitterness. It's about laying down the life of God, the Son so that even the angriest, bitterness of men might feel that cleansing cascade of love that flows from Jesus' wounds.

When Susan teaches at the juvenile center, she is struck afresh again and again, at how her two hours a week of Bible truth teaching and discussions with the teens is but a drop in the bucket of worldly heartaches and pressures that go on all the rest of the week. She talks about purity and they laugh, she talks about lasting marriages and they scoff, she talks about creation and they say, “So what?” She talks about Jesus and they can't hear her for the noise in their heads. Voices yelling, “Grow up!” Voices yelling, “We don't want you anymore!” Voices yelling out rage and anger, so loudly that they drown out her still small voice crying, “Love is there. Embrace Him.”

Now love is an action word. The Bible teaches us that. Love can buy the pizza, love can play the games, love can pray prayers. But love has to go so deep that it transcends all the superficial and gets to the heart of it all. Love needs to listen, love must have an answer for all the unfairness and hurts. Love must take time to play, time to teach, and time to sing. Love has got to be there…be there…be there.

If each life is of infinite worth and value to God, then each young man must be of value to us. What will we do and how can we be there? How will we demonstrate faithful marriages, loving words, and kind attention? Are we willing to risk anything for the sake of another? How can we make Jesus REAL and His claims come true, if not with the sacrifice of our own lives.
To the discouraged and disillusioned young men who are looking for something to hope for, something to live for and someone to love…to each one who is looking for someone to believe in them, hope in them and love them…we must become a Jesus they can see. We must win the right to offer our truth for answers to their lives.

Can we be there?
before another young man bites the dust

Can we volunteer to be a Big Brother?
before another boy becomes a Peter Pan

Can we get Café 41:11 in Medina up and running?
before even one more young man finds friends on the streets

Can we open a home for men,
where God and family is uplifted?
before another broken family rips out another young heart

Can we start a ranch for young boys
to model all the good that they haven't seen?
before another chooses all that isn't God

What would it take
from us and from you?

some money

some stuff

some time

some…love.