After attending a Christian church conference in Kansas City, MO, the summer of 2014, I returned home with my Christian beliefs strong and on fire. At the church conference, I never heard a curse word or disrespectful comments. Two weeks later, however, I arrived in Seattle, Washington, to attend the National Student Leadership Conference in healthcare and stepped into a different world. It was common to hear f-bomb, other curse words, and sexual jokes among the guys; occasionally, I heard these among the girls. One average-height, blonde, freckled-face boy from Seattle, a high school wrestler, greeted me with a friendly f-bomb as I unpacked my clothes in my dorm room—he was to be my roommate. My face burned with shock and discomfort. I didn’t know what to say and wondered what kind of experience lay ahead for me.
I normally hear the type of commentary at my school back home, but I had spent most of the summer involved in church activities with my Christian friends, so I was not prepared to my sudden return to the typical teenage world. I couldn’t help but feel that all the curse worlds and sexual commentary were unnecessary and even childish and immature. I put up with it and didn’t reveal my feelings to anyone. But every time we were not attending a meeting or gathering and just hung out in the hallways or dorms, the students joked around with each other in that crude teenage language. Don’t get me wrong—these students were not bad kids, just normal teenagers living the teenage life. I was the one who had changed. I used to talk like that before I became a Christian, but now I found it hard to fit in. My roommate turned out to be a cool guy, who became a good friend. He was reliable and responsible, serious about his studies, and very smart. I explained that I was a Christian and didn’t feel comfortable using curse words; he respected my beliefs. We even made plans to hang out together in Seattle after the conference, when my parents and two younger brothers arrived to pick me up and spend a few days in town. Unfortunately, he was so busy we couldn’t find a good time to meet.
Throughout the days at the conference, I blocked out the curse words and any other commentary that made me feel uncomfortable. Eventually I stopped paying attention, and these expressions only became extra words in a sentence. I started to notice how talented and intelligent a lot of these high school teens were. One student complained that he had scored a 1900 on his SAT because he was having a bad day when he took the test. Another student impressed me by how much he knew about neurology. And another sounded like a dictionary every time he spoke. Suddenly, I found myself opening up to what these kids knew—they had a lot to teach me. Teenagers typically wear blue jeans, rock band t-shirts, sneakers, and they curse—these are details people notice on the outside. If we take time to look beneath the surface, we find teens who are more disciplined and conscientious than they look. I learned not to judge other teens by the way they speak or dress.