The Judas Ride

A few months back my pastor spoke on the youth of today. He spoke about how it is the responsibility of adults, those who have journeyed through the raging hormones, acne, and teen angst, and have safely come out on the other side, to reach out to the youth with the love of God. The one thing I appreciated was that our need to reach out to them is not something we can put off – it must be done today.

During his sermon he played a video in which children, ranging from three to fourteen years in age, spoke about their need for adults to share the Gospel with them. In the video they each took turns to say what their ages would be in ten years time. The video was very haunting in that it ended with the children saying that in ten years it could be too late to reach them – their exact words, “You’re losing us.”

About twenty years ago I watched the movie, River’s Edge starring a young Keanu Reeves. The movie as I remember it was a disturbingly chilling, yet effective examination of the alienation and ambivalence felt by many of the youth around the mid 1980’s. What I will always remember is that the movie had an air of hopelessness running throughout that seemed to point to an even more hopeless scenario – that happy endings only happen in fairy tales.

The Judas Ride by Peggey Sue Yarber reminds me in many ways of that movie. It is not an easy novel to read, in fact it’s outright depressing at times, as the story contained in this book is one of the hopelessness felt by many of today’s youth. As an adult I often forget what it is like to be part of the youth culture. I grew up in a bad neighborhood and witnessed firsthand some of the terrible and tragic things that happen in this book – teen pregnancy, abuse, violence, drug and alcohol addiction, and so on. Maybe that’s why this book stands out to me as an important story for our times, because it forced me to remember what it was like to suffer and endure such an existence, if in fact you can call a life without hope existence at all. And it caused me to ask myself, “What am I now doing to help?”

Twenty years on, I have moved on, far from where I was in my youth. I now have a loving family, a growing ministry, and life is good. But The Judas Ride took me right back to my youth and enabled me to feel great empathy towards the youth of today. Through it, they face the same kind of challenges and choices I and many of my friends were faced with – if not worse.

This book should be read by the youth of today to show them the dangers and consequences of their actions and life choices. Parents should also read this book to raise awareness as to the plight of many of today’s youth, and their struggle to survive from day to day in an ever oppressing world. It is a story of hopelessness and tragedy, of young adults who have all but given up of life. But it is important, because The Judas Ride is also a story of hope, a story that shows that there can be a better way, that there is hope for those who live on margins of society and who are oftentimes neglected. It is a story of triumph in the face of tragedy, courage in spite of fear, and hope even in the darkest of nights.

So the question is asked, “What will you do to help?” Because the voices of those children are still ringing in my ears, as sadly they proclaim, “You’re losing us.”

Christian St John M.Div, BChM, ACS
October, 2009