Reggie Joiner is the founder and CEO of Orange (The reThink Group, Inc), a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to influence those who influence the next generation by providing resources and training for churches and organizations that create environments for parents, kids, and teenagers. 

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

In this season, I’ve been sitting in the passage in Corinthians that says Blessed be God, the God of all comfort, who comforts us with the comfort with which we can comfort others. 

I think everyone is going through a crisis at a different level during this season. And I think that we need each other more than we've ever needed each other. There's a sense in which that passage teaches us that there is a kind of comfort that only comes from God that we can't get from other people. But then it goes on to explain that he gives us that so that we can, in return, comfort those around us. 

And so there's both a human factor and a God factor, that exist in that passage when it comes to comfort. And we're living in a world right now where there's a lot of anxiety and depression coming into this crisis. There was. And now, especially in the teenage zone and the zone of middle schoolers, there is this accelerated anxiety and depression. And we get to lean into leaders and to anyone who has a position or a voice and say “Hey, more than ever before, there's a generation listening, watching and needing for us to give them hope to say this is going to be okay. We're gonna get through this.”

This is such an important time to take that human comfort and hopefulness that we can have and hand it to a generation because they desperately need to hear us say, we're going to get through this.