How to Get Out of Your Dark Places

The Drama Bench

by Dan Saint, Youth Director at the Mission Church

The past week has been a high point in my life. I spent 5 nights cleaning toilets, made the best of my cooking for twelve meals and made somewhere around 12 trips to “the drama bench”. The drama bench happens to be a real place at the Sunny View Expo Center in Oshkosh, WI, but for me it represents a safe place where the students that I serve with can open up about the junk in their lives. As we go through life we all struggle and have pain, we are insecure, lonely, angry, confused, and overwhelmed. Often the thing we need most is the drama bench. A place where we can cry, yell or just be silent. It is a place where someone cares and listens, and sometimes can help us find the way out of our dark place. I have been in and out of many dark places in my life, and I am so grateful for the people who helped me through them. Sometimes that person is a mentor who listens quietly; sometimes it was my older brother telling me exactly how he saw what I was going through and that I should just knock it off.  So here is my giant THANK YOU to all those people who sat on a drama bench with me.

My challenge to you is to both seek out a drama bench in your life so you can vent and get out of your dark place, and to be available to sit and listen when someone else is in need of a drama bench.