Bailey Shepard is a Ministry Assistant in Student Ministry at Liberty Live Church in Hampton Roads, VA. She is passionate about discipleship and leading up the next generation of girls, especially girls in middle and high school. She also specifically loves helping young girls and women navigate through depression, anxiety, and other mental health needs through scripture and prayer.
Over the past couple of years I’ve begun discipling teenage girls. Recently this has looked like 6am Starbucks meetups and a ride to school. As I sit in the somewhat quiet coffee shop in the early morning, while people are peacefully grabbing coffee to start their days, I easily grow frustrated with my chatty, giggly, 15 year-old girls. Constantly reminding them to stay focused on our study book, I wonder to myself if I am even teaching them anything? Are they learning anything, growing in their walk, or growing in their faith? I find it very easy to become frustrated and discouraged during this time. I threaten to embarrass them when I drop them off at school (cue the Freaky Friday scene when Jamie Lee Curtis shouts to Lindsay Lohan out of the car window to “Make good choices!”), and hurry them out of Starbucks to make sure we aren’t late for drop off.
When I am questioning my calling, God reminds me that He called me to do this for a reason. He equipped me and chose me to lead and disciple middle and high school girls. He continues to give me every tool that I need to not only lead these girls through a Bible study book, but to also lead them by example. He has called me to invite them into my life, to show them what the messy, realistic, raw walk with the Lord looks like in a young adult Christian woman. I don’t have it all together, and my girls certainly know that, especially when I tell them to be serious and stay focused, then I cut a joke with them soon after.
Discipling these girls also pushes me to be more disciplined in my own time spent with Jesus. How could I tell them to read their Bibles and pray every day if I’m not doing that myself? In Titus, Paul says, “In the same way, older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not slaves to excessive drinking. They are to teach what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children, to be self-controlled, pure, workers at home, kind, and in submission to their husbands, so that God’s word will not be slandered” (Titus 2:3-5 CSB). I believe that, just like other commands that God gives us, we are commanded to disciple girls that are younger than us and not as far in their walk with the Lord, just as we are to be discipled by older women that are farther in their walk with the Lord.
God didn’t call me to be perfect. God called me to be a disciple. He called all believers to be disciples, actually. Thank you, God, for choosing me!