Welcome to the Living Youth Programs website!

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All you need to know…

  • If you are here for teen camp or preteen camp photos, the many posts are scattered below.
  • If you are here for the weekly podcast, then click right here for the whole collection: The Living Youth Podcast.
  • If you’re here to discover what else is out here (other videos, posts, links to other things), well then explore away! Recent posts are dominated by camp photos, but keep looking.
  • If you’d like to give feedback about the podcast or even suggest topics or questions (or, really, mention anything about this site, in general), you contact us at [email protected], which we are told works great now! (Thanks, I.T.!)
  • If you’re here for help with your math homework, we’d love to provide, but you probably need to look elsewhere…

Podcast: Finding a Job in a Compromising World

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On the podcast this week, we address a question from one of our young adult listeners. As the world turns increasingly twisted, there are growing pressures on Christians in the workforce to compromise their values. This listener asks us what choices a young person can make to help prepare for that. We take on the question, along with our special guest, Mr. Jonathan McNair, Director of Living Education for the Living Church of God.

The YouTube and Spotify Links are below.

(And not only will this be the last podcast until after the Feast of Tabernacles is over, but it may also be the last post of any sort here on the Living Youth website until after the Feast, as well. but we do have more in the works! We are looking forward to posting Christian Living classes from this past year’s teen camp, new videos, new essays from new writers, new podcasts, and other goodies we find here and there. So, until then, have a wonderful Feast of Tabernacles and Last Great Day!)

Note: For some reason, this Spotify episode is not embedding well. However, following this link should take you there just fine. If it doesn’t, let us know and we’ll try to fix it. If the embedding gets better, we’ll come back, refresh all of this, and you’ll never know there was any problem at all… 🙂

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4PEzpo2819aof9vcAJRjeC

P.S. The built-in Spotify embed tool is still wonky, but this workaround seems to do the trick. Hopefully you see the embed below.

Podcast: Why Is the Day of the Lord So “Extra”?

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The Feast of Trumpets, picturing the events preceding the return of Jesus Christ, is only days away. The days pictured by this Holy Day are extreme, and it’s worth taking the time to think about why they need to be that way. So, let’s talk about it. The Spotify and YouTube links are below.

A young Queen Elizabeth’s inspirational words to other young adults

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After recording our last podcast, I was prompted to watch the full version of a short clip of a speech Queen Elizabeth gave on the occasion of her 21st birthday. In it, she comments on the “great joy” of being a young adult, having grown up in “terrible and glorious” years, and entering the time when one can begin to take some of the burden off of those who have gone before. It is a remarkable speech, and I hope it resonates with all of you.

It is quaintly raw, with pauses for the camera to be repositioned or focused or for a redo. But at less than 8 minutes, we believe it is worth your time, listening to Queen Elizabeth when she was closer to your age—the exact same age as many of you, in fact—and hearing the advice she has to give.

Podcast: Why the Queen Matters

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After a sort-of-accidental break last week, we’re back! And we could not help but talk about the queen in this podcast episode. The death of Queen Elizabeth II should prompt us to consider some very important things regardless of our nationality—including biblical connections that few understand. Her death symbolizes the end of an era in many ways and reminds us of just how different our current era truly is. We hope you enjoy the discussion. The YouTube and Spotify links are right below. Also, we mention a few other items in the podcast, and those, as well as some additional resources, are listed below the YouTube and Spotify embeds—just scroll a little lower!

  • Booklet: The United States and Great Britain in Prophecy
  • Video, Canadian Telecast: “The Real History of the British Monarchy”
  • P.S. I forgot we were going to share this, too! Here is the speech we mentioned (very quaintly raw footage when creating such things were fairly new, with camera changes and “start overs”), recorded in Cape Town, South Africa, in which the young Elizabeth says she will devote her life to her people’s service. It was actually something she said when she was only 21, around four years before becoming queen. The part we had in mind begins here at 4:50, and we’ve started the clip at that link a little early so you can get the context of her discussion of the oath taken by her ancestors as they reached adulthood. You’ll need to watch it past the first camera change. (She actually does it twice for two camera takes, and the clip ends during the second take). But you might consider listening to the whole clip from the beginning, as it’s only 7 to 8 minutes long. In particular, something I noted in watching the whole thing, that I had not seen when I found the small clip, was her comments to her age-wise peers (a lot of you guys!) about coming into adulthood. She notes that reaching such an age in life is the time to take on the burdens of one’s elders who have sacrificed so much to protect the childhood of the young. It really struck me, and I wish I had heard something like that when I was 21. In fact, I might even make the video a separate post. We hope you find her words inspirational and motivational.

Podcast: Why the Work Matters

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Today on the podcast, we revisit the topic we recorded last time but didn’t publish, so we wanted to tilt at it again: Why the Work of preaching the Gospel of God’s Kingdom to the world matters. It is essential to living as a Christian, but it’s easy to be distracted from that fundamental truth, especially in our youth. Yet embracing that truth and growing to understand how the Work should matter to you, personally, can be transformative and can help enable God to produce in you the eternal fruit He is looking to produce. So, enjoy this podcast! We get a little passionate in places, but, you know, if you can’t be passionate about the Work of Jesus Christ in the world, what else can you be passionate about?

The YouTube and Spotify links/embeds are below. And under those are links to the resources we mentioned in the podcast.

Here are links to the resources mentioned in the podcast:

Apologies, Appendectomies, and Two Lessons

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My apologies that we did not get a Living Youth Podcast up last week! We did record it on Friday (the video below is a little confusing on that point; I sort of mixed up my days), but for the reasons I mention, I did not get it edited and posted. But, for all of the excitement of yesterday, I thought a couple of lessons emerged from the experience that were worthwhile to pass on. So, hopefully, this quick video will do—and look for the podcast later this week! I’ve recorded this video a little hastily (for instance, I don’t mean to imply that enduring to the end is not a part of the confidence I discuss), but I still hope that this is helpful in some way.

Kurzgesagt on the Human Immune System

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Are you familiar with Kurzgesagt videos? Apparrently, “kurzgesagt” is German for “briefly said” or the English idiom “in a nutshell.” And the Kurzgesagt YouTube channel aims at making complex and interesting topics simple to understand. Regrettably, they come from the sort of background you might expect for worldly science folks: Pro-evolution, etc. Still, the way they explain topics is often both entertaining and educational—and, when it happens to highlight the amazing design of life, they end up providing a Romans 1:20 witness to God’s power and how amazing His design of creation truly is.

As a sample, we thought their video below on the human immune system is simply fantastic at illustrating just how remarkable this God-designed system truly is. We’ve written about it before (in the TW: “The War Beneath Your Skin”), and seeing it discussed at length in these videos—yet so succinctly with such pleasant illustrations—really brings out details we would never have space to include in an article.

So, feel free to take a look at the first video (one in a series of three) and see if it impresses you, as well, at how amazing God’s design of your body truly is. And if they bring up evolution, ask yourself: How plausible is it really that such a system could evolve? The answer is pretty obvious when you think about it—not plausible at all.

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