Years ago, in college, I spent a Saturday night at a house party somewhere in the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania.

I was visiting a friend and didn’t know anyone else there, though most of them, like me, were Christian college students. There was a lot of beer, a lot of early-aughts indie rock, and a lot of jawing about the hypocrisy of the church and the lameness of the earnest worship leaders in the campus chapel.

In the wee hours of the morning, a friend of my friend staggered into the kitchen and announced that he wanted help moving cars in the driveway. He needed to drive home so he could get to church in the morning.

His friends looked at him like, come on. Sleep on the couch, they told him; they’d move cars in the morning. He was unconvinced. If they wouldn’t help, he’d squeeze through the narrow lane alongside the gravel drive.

We followed him outside into the winter night. There was no way.

“You’re going to do a thousand dollars of damage to someone’s car,” someone told him. “Just stay, Tyler. We’ll get you to church.”

“I know you guys,” he whined. “You’re not gonna be up in the morning.”

From what I knew about them, he was right. Like me, they were raised and formed in the church. Whether by choice or the pressure of parents, they were students at a Christian liberal arts college, where they were chafing, pushing, wrestling against the expectations of their childhood religion, deciding what to keep and what to reject.

Tyler went on. “You guys don’t care. You’re always like ‘F— church.’ ‘F— God,’” he slurred.

Without missing a beat, his friend responded: “Yeah, but we don’t say ‘F— Tyler.’”

That was the moment that calmed him down and got us all back into the warmth of the house. It’s also the moment that, twenty years later, I can’t stop thinking about.

For all its vulgarity, there was an unmistakable tenderness to it—young men expressing their own ethic of loyalty. They might rail against religion in the abstract, but they showed kindness to the friend in front of them.

What strikes me is the heat in their relationship to faith. They blustered, argued, and cursed the confines they felt, but there was real energy to it. They had something to push against.

As my own sons approach adolescence, I hope they’ll make wise decisions in such situations, choosing safety, moderation, and kindness. But there’s something else I want for them that I saw that night. It has to do with heat and anger and a sort of productive tension with religion.

I don’t fully have words for this. My kids are growing up in a different world than I did–different institutions, different culture, different politics, different technologies. And while I don’t want indoctrination for them—from simplistic Sunday School answers or anything else—I want them to have some raw material to push against. Some basic literacy of biblical stories, some sense of belonging and accountability, some sense of a river of tradition that predates all of us, even if they find it mystifying or stifling or boring.

I don’t know if Tyler made it to church on time. I don’t know if God wants our hungover hearts in worship or prefers we stay home with water and ibuprofen. And I am not suggesting that “don’t let your friends drive drunk” is a complete and sufficient social ethic.

But on that frigid night, a kid I barely knew saw his friend across a gap of belief, temperament, and sobriety, and then had eyes to see what his friend needed. I’m still learning from that.

Snowy cars photo by Hemo BiNNi on Unsplash