Adult Swim

My family spends a lot of time at our neighborhood pool in the summer. The pool is packed with kids and teens, splashing around on floaty noodles and inner tubes. And as much as I love this time with my family and our friends, I kind of hate being in the pool when it’s packed like that.

But there’s this amazing moment that happens a couple of times a day – the lifeguards all blow their whistles and shout out the most beautiful words I have ever heard at a public pool …

“Adult Swim!”

A collective groan can be heard from all the children as they reluctantly exit the pool and head to the snack bar.

The adults, on the other hand, come alive.

We all wade into the pool with our coozy-covered drinks and there’s five noodles for every adult to float on! There’s space and time to just talk and float and soak up the sun. And no one is splashing you or climbing on your back or begging you to count how long they can hold their breath under water.

It’s glorious.

“Adult Swim” Parent Events

As I have been dreaming of resource events for PRiSM parents, I had a flash of inspiration …  they shall be called Adult Swim!

While they are not held at the pool and no swimsuits are required, I do hope they provide something similar to the Adult Swim at my neighborhood pool – time and space for parents to talk and share and encourage each other with community and resources.

It has been my vision for a long time to have a yearly series on sex and relationships in PRiSM.

As my team prepared to take this on in February 2017, it became immediately obvious we needed to engage our PRiSM parents on this crucial topic too.

Our very first Adult Swim event was held a few weeks ago on a Sunday night in the Student Center. I was hoping for about 30 people. I made 40 copies of everything just in case. Well we had 80 parents come to this!

Turns out parents really DO want to be resourced and connected and encouraged!

We spent some time going over each topic that was to be taught in Middle School and High School so parents would be prepared to follow up. We heard a powerful message from David Galvan, an expert on teens and sex, who works for Life Network delivering a subtly gospel-soaked message on teen sex in our city’s High Schools. David hosted a time of Q & A’s, where really brave and honest questions were asked and talked about as a group. We closed in a time of prayer for each other, for our teenagers, for our city and for our parenting.

It was such a sweet, sweet time together.

This particular Adult Swim resource event will happen every year to kick off our sex and relationship series. And we are dreaming about other helpful topics that more Adult Swim resource events could launch.

The Talks

I kicked off our sex series a couple Sundays ago and we had our first small groups the following Wednesday night, where the students dove into the topic of sex head first in a less formal discussion. There are 25 amazing adult volunteer small group leaders leading the way in these discussions every Wednesday night for the entire month of February!

As a parent now, can you imagine believing adults speaking into your life like that on the topic of sex back when you were a student? I experienced nothing like that in my youth group growing up. That’s kind of life-changing, don’t you think?

God is doing great things through this amazing team of leaders and through this crucial series.

One group in particular, our 6th grade boys, is being led in such a great way it almost brings me to tears. How on earth do you get 6th grade boys to talk about sex? Well our two men leading that group brought M&M’s to Small Groups (we use candy often in youth group) and they challenged the boys to talk about sex in a meaningful way. And for every time a boy in the group used the word “sex” and said something meaningful about it, they were rewarded with M&M’s. Isn’t that creative and hilarious and beautiful all at the same time?

6th grade talking about sex together with Godly men!

Wow.

In PRiSM, our students are truly FLOURISHING.