I was invited to a school this week. I don't have good memories from my school years, especially my high school years, so I haven't really been interested in visiting one. But a teenage girl from my church invited me, she's taking a religious study class and they're going through the biggest world religions there. They got to Christianity now and she asked me whether I would come and speak about it to her classmates. Phew, that's a big one, I thought. I'm sort of scared of teenagers, to be honest. I teach grown-ups, people who are studying not because they have to but because they want to (I know it's not always as simple as that lol but in principle it should be), people who don't have to report to their teachers and parents about how they're doing. Would I know how to speak to teenagers? Because, you know, it's kind of a decade and plus years since I was one myself. But on the other hand, you don't turn down these kind of invites either. In the end of a day, someone will have to tell them about Christianity and maybe I would do it, using slightly simpler words that someone else. So I took the challenge. I paced back and forth in my kitcen that morning, trying to practice my "Christianity talk" in my head. And then I went.

I put on my big nerdy glasses and some lipstick and I went and stood in front of a bunch of teenagers and told them about Christians and why I'm one of them. I don't know what went on in their minds but I could see what went on on their faces. For almost 45 minutes they looked at me with their eyes wide open and steadily fixed on me. Not one of them fidgeted. And I switched on my lecturer's mode and told them everything I know about Christianity. Well, maybe not everything, but about the main things. And about my own lifestyle - why I rest one day each week (I simply wouldn't survive without a Sabbath, I told them), why I respect ten commandments, why I think making healthy lifestyle choices is important, why I think there's a calling and a passion in each of our lives planted in us by God. In the end of the class they asked really good and sharp questions, some of which I had a ready answer to, some of which I didn't have an answer to. And in the very end when the class was over, I was like, "Can I give you some life advice that doesn't have to do with this class? Read books, study hard, go study abroad, and always respect people who are different from you."

They clapped in the end of the class. Maybe I shouldn't be afraid of teenagers after all?

I thought about the impact one can have later when I left. And about the power of inventing oneself. They didn't know me before. Well, in a way, they still don't. They don't know what kind of **** I have to deal with in my own life. But all they needed to know and all they needed to see was a young woman with nerdy glasses and some lipstick who passionately believed in the message and lifestyle of Christianity. The word is out that Christians are mostly old people who don't have any hopes left for this life and this world, so they have to invent an imaginary world they can look forward to after they die. Don't buy into this lie, I told the teenagers, it's simply not true, and in a modest way I try to be the proof of this being a lie. I think they believed me.