You Never Really Know What Lasts

Many years ago, when I was a young youth worker, I took a small group of teenagers away for a weekend in Donegal. I was coming towards the end of my youth work diploma and, in my own mind at least, I was beginning to feel like I knew what I was doing.

I had prepared all the sessions, had a clear plan for the weekend and felt capable and fit for purpose. It also helped that we were in one of the most beautiful places in the world, with that wild, windswept Donegal landscape around us.

By Sunday morning, though, I felt completely different. The sessions had not gone the way I had hoped; there had been all sorts of mishaps, the young people had messed about most of the weekend and, from my point of view, very little had been taken seriously.

The bus journey home was a quiet one for me. I remember feeling defeated and wondering if I was any good at this.

About ten years later, I bumped into one of the young fellas who had been on that trip. We got chatting and somehow the Donegal weekend came up, and he told me how much fun it had been and thanked me for taking them.

I laughed and told him that I remembered it very differently. I said it had felt like a complete disaster to me and that I had gone home convinced I had failed.

He looked at me and said something I have never forgotten. He said that weekend was one of the first times in his life that he had felt properly seen.

Somewhere in the middle of all the messing about and the sessions that I thought had failed, something had landed with him. He told me it had made him feel that there might be more to his life and that it had shaped him in the years that followed as he became a husband and father.

He also told me he had cancer. He said that, partly because of what had begun for him back then, he now had a deep faith that there was more to life than what we can see.

He died the following year. I have thought about that conversation many times since.

Mostly because I had judged that weekend as a failure, but he hadn’t. I thought I was measuring the weekend by whether the sessions worked. He was measuring it by whether, for perhaps the first time, he felt that his life mattered.

Maybe we do that more often than we realise. We want to know if what we are doing is working, and we want some evidence that it mattered.

Sometimes, if we are being truthful, we want a bit of recognition as well. But a lot of the good we put into the world probably disappears beyond our sight.

It might be a conversation, a bit of encouragement, making someone feel seen, giving someone a chance, or simply showing up when it matters. We may never know what any of it becomes.

And maybe there is something freeing in that. You can simply put some good into the world and not always need to know where it ends up.

Maybe we don’t always get to know what the good we offer becomes. Perhaps our job is simply to keep offering it.

So this week, maybe the question is simply this: What good can you put into the world this week without needing to know the outcome?