GOODS AND

GOODS AND GET BETTERS

by Michael Sturdy

“How was your day?” “Fine.”

My mother and I had this exact conversation almost every day after school for years. Maybe the tone with which I said “fine” gave some indication of how it actually went, but mostly my mom would light-heartedly joke about what an interesting and descriptive answer that was and leave it up to me whether I felt like talking about it beyond “fine.”

I have a feeling that we were far from outliers when it came to this conversation. Maybe a student doesn’t feel like reliving what they just experienced. Maybe there are too many characters to keep up with in a story to make it worth telling. Or maybe it’s just hard to tell a story to your parents, even if they’re the best ones in the world (which mine happen to be).

That’s why I love Wednesdays. For the uninitiated: During the school year, the Fig Youth meets almost every Wednesday night for Crossover. We say Evening Prayer together, share a meal, and generally hang out– some of us play video games together while others play chess or pool or foosball, and some of us draw or color or make origami art. During all of that we talk, we vent, we joke, we laugh.

And then we do my favorite part - Goods and Get Betters. The middle schoolers go to their room in the Youth Center, the high schoolers go to their room, and we talk. In the high school room, where I most often found myself on Wednesdays (because I sat with the middle schoolers on Sundays), we would sit in a circle and everyone got a chance to say one thing that was good this week and one thing that we hope will get better going forward (also known as the thing that wasn’t good this week).

“I got to work with horses this week and I loved it so much.”

“Something happened that makes me feel like my friends like each other more than they like me.”

“The doctor is prescribing new medicine to see if it helps.”

“My cat woke me up at 4:30 this morning.”

“My favorite show is coming back with a new season.”

“The school administration said there was a fight on campus, but I saw it happen and that wasn’t how I experienced it.”

“I’ve got four tests in two days and I need some of them to go really well. I don’t know what’s going to happen if they don’t.”

“My Good is that I looked forward to coming to Crossover all week and now I’m here.”

As a parent, I am desperate to know how my children’s day went. I want to know what went on in the lives of the people who hold my heart and soul. At Crossover, the volunteers and I get to be listening ears for the highs and lows of our church’s youth, and we do not take that responsibility lightly. The Fig has long strived to be an extended family for so many who come here, and it has been an honor to continue the work of expanding the family our youth have access to. It absolutely counts as my Good for this year.