When I was in junior high and early high school, I was, well, like I was in elementary school: pretty quiet, pretty awkward around lots of kids, and pretty unsure of where I fit in with people. I was pretty fortunate to be raised in a family where my folks let us try a lot of different things though, and they encouraged us to be involved with folks. Early on, I wasn’t stellar at interaction, but my folks tossed us kids into activities anyways.

My first foray into sports was through baseball. For whatever reason, baseball was the game to play as an elementary school kid. Maybe that was because they had teams for elementary school aged kids, whereas basketball did not- I don’t know. After a few years of that and a growth spurt, they let me play basketball as well in middle school. I wasn’t the best athlete in the world, but they helped me to experience life on a team, and they made sure I got out and ran around in my youth, not just sitting in my room all the time at home.

Basketball was a bigger deal where we grew up: in Albuquerque, it was the marquis sport of the day, as it still is. On our street, it’s what all the bigger kids played for hours every afternoon on some driveway court after school or in the dry heat during the summers. I am sure if my folks hadn’t put me in sports, I would have been a bookworm (or a slug) throughout my teenage years.

If I wasn’t at a team thingie during the summers or autumns as a kid, then it was probably a church function. The youth choirs at our church in my adolescent years were fun, a big deal, and massive, so we were encouraged to join one of them if we wanted to. And once you did join one of them, you met a lot of kids from different schools around the city. I joined a smaller choir in fifth grade and somehow made a special ensemble from those kids that year which did a featured song in the massive Christmas production that year, among other special performances done periodically in evening services later in the year. That choir gave way to junior high choir in a year, which meant more kids to mingle with, watch, and wonder how you came across to them as a 6th grade sociophobe. But once you were in the youth choirs, you were in the tides of the church youth culture quickly, as either an observer or a wave maker.

And inevitably, being in the youth choirs let you to be active in the youth group activities, and with burgeoning hormones and acute self-awareness, you faced questions about love and dating and and kissing and what all that meant for the first time personally, and you had your first major crush. In my case, my junior high years were a series of crushes. Too shy and too confused to explore the meaning of “going around” and hormonal impulses, and too insecure to interact with the females I fancied, I developed a pattern early on as a kid to crush on a girl and pine because I felt to inadequate to be around her as a friend. An artificial line developed in my heart sometime as a child that told me if I liked a girl, she probably would not reciprocate that, and the best I could do is wish for a relationship with her, imagine what it might be like to be close to her, and leave things at that. And so that is how my romantically relational heart developed, sequestered in silence, and flawed by fear, which explains why my teenage and young adult years were filled with a series of quiet but consuming crushes, and undoubtedly, in response to my introverted impulses, a longing to be loved.

I think the reality is that as adults, we do not move very far in personality and in tendency from who we essentially emerged as in adolescence unless something seismic tips our life and restructures the way we normally think and act and live. Fortunately, experiences and events, either terrific or traumatic at a moment in time, do change us, and we change because of them. At least they provide the opportunity for us to change. The hard work when those opportunities break open before us is to know which voices to listen to in our lives- and in our hearts- to make the choices which help us to change for the better- to become better people, better friends, better lovers.

Sometimes we aren’t aware of the size of the opportunities that are in front of us through a choice we must make- be it about doing something different, or about adopting an appropriate attitude in the face of a trial or hardship. But at least there is a grace in the fact that those opportunities to change are before us, even if they come wrapped in a dark day.

For me, being encouraged to participate in activities as a kid and a teen pushed me to get outside of myself and to be involved with others- a practice I may not have developed if I had been left to follow my own inclinations, which at the time usually meant staying home and alone in a quiet back bedroom. Participation on teams and at church at least made me face some of the realities of life and relationships that we need to face as a young person, making us aware of the significance and the consequences of being in relationships.

Participation also helped me to discover I had a pretty decent hook shot when backed up in the low post, which helped me to see I was a decent contributor to my pickup game teams.