REFLECTION: International Youth Day

All too often young people are often met with an eyeroll. They’re considered too idealistic, too fragile, too distracted, too much. But look again. Beneath the surface of casual dismissal is a generation quietly carrying the weight of a world that feels unsteady. And still, they rise. They question, they create, they ache for integrity. They long for lives that are deep and real.

International Youth Day invites us to look beneath the surface and to see more clearly, to honour the quiet resilience and restless searching of young people who are learning what it means to live by faith. Not faith as certainty, as it is often construed, but as trust.

Faith, as Rowan Williams writes, “is what you discover when you look long and hard into the heart of things and realise you are still held.” This kind of faith is not about escaping the pressures of life. It is the slow, often uncertain decision to remain open and to remain present, even when the path forward is unclear.

And this is precisely what so many young people are doing. In my work at Raymont College, I am privileged to see this up close. Young people are choosing to show up: in friendships marked by compassion, in questions that resist easy, neatly packaged answers, in creative acts of protest and hard work. They are discovering that faith isn’t about having it all together. It’s about being held, and holding one another, in the middle of uncertainty.

This kind of faith doesn’t shout. It listens. It pays attention. It makes room for others. It risks being changed. And though it may not always emerge in the way we expect, it bears the unmistakable marks of grace, trust, and hope.

By faith, young people today are not retreating from the world. They are stepping more deeply into it and learning to live in the tension, to wait with patience, and to believe that even now, something good is on the horizon.

So, this year for International Youth Day, may we resist the urge to overlook young people. May we look deeper and listen closely. Perhaps we might find a renewed courage to live by faith.

Written by James Weeks, Deputy Principal at Raymont Residential College.