Typically, world leaders are older individuals with at least a bit of graying in their hair. Seldom are they adolescents. The story I’m about to tell is foreign to us – literally and figuratively. It’s the story about a young girl who led a revolution of sorts. Her name is Malala Yousafzai, also known in the literary world as Gul Makai.1
Pakistan, 2008. The Swat Valley. Eleven-year-old Malala loved school. She looked forward to it every day and detested winter break. The Taliban government hated schools because they believed westernized concepts were compromising fundamentalist Islamic teachings. An edict was delivered, banning girls from schools and making sure that the boys were taught in the ways of Islam. Failure to comply resulted in bombings and death threats to teachers, students, and parents.
Malala wasn’t going to stand for this. She went “to a local press club in Peshawar, where she gave her first public speech, entitled “How Dare the Taliban Take Away My Basic Right to Education?” She also started an online blog under her pen name, detailing what the Taliban had done.2
By 2009, the Taliban had been pushed out of the Swat Valley. School returned to normal for Malala. However, this incident had ignited a passion in her. She knew that the Taliban was doing this elsewhere and that they needed to be stopped. While most people feared the Taliban and their fatal retribution, Malala stood up to them, continuing her writing.
October 9, 2012. Malala is now 15 years old. Riding the bus home from school, the Taliban boarded the bus and shot her in the head. The bullet grazed her skull and jaw. She was transported to a hospital in Pakistan and was then sent to a hospital in the United Kingdom. Amazingly, she survived.
Word of this event got to the United Nations. She was recuperated enough on July 12, 2013, that she was able to address a session of the United Nation, saying, “They thought that the bullets would silence us. But they failed.” She called on governments around the world to protect the rights of women and girls, and “to ensure free compulsory education for every child all over the world.” That same year, she published the book I am Malala, which reached number three on the New York Times‘ nonfiction bestseller list, and she launched The Malala Fund, to support the cause for girls’ education. The fund’s first grant went to support the schooling of 40 girls in the Swat Valley.”3
By October 10, 2014, Malala was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her accomplishments, the youngest ever to receive this award. She was in school the day the notification came. What did she do? She was in chemistry class at the time and the only reasonable thing to do was to go to her next class – physics. Malala figured that if she received the Nobel Prize for education, she ought to at least finish out her day of education.
What an amazing young lady! Today, Malala is 27 years old, a graduate of Oxford University, married, and executive chairman of the board of a global organization with nearly 70 executive staff members who reach into nine lower-income countries where girls face repression, abuse, and are denied basic human rights and privileges.
If one girl can make this kind of a difference, just think about one young Christian kid could make if they were on fire like Malala.
2 Kings 22:1-2 tells the story about someone younger than Malala. “Josiah was eight
years old when he began to reign, and he reigned thirty and one years in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Jedidah, the daughter of Adaiah of Boscath. (2) And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, and walked in all the way of David his father, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left.”
I have preached quite often that our modern culture does a disservice to our young people and the church tends to fall in step with the world’s pattern. We treat children as children. Expectations for maturity are low, emphasis is placed on pursuing sports, dance, and music, and if a child isn’t gifted in these things, just sit them in front of a television screen for hours with a game controller in their hands.
I think kids are capable of so much more!
To a young preacher – perhaps someone in their teens – Paul said in 1 Timothy 4:12, “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”
Let’s be a catalyst for change in the lives of our young people. Let’s help them establish Biblical priorities early, leaving behind the entrapments of the world that don’t help them spiritually mature. Let’s give them opportunities to serve and develop their God-given gifts.
Best of all, the elder ought to be models for the younger. I close out with these passages found in Titus 2:1-8 and I ask each of us elders to find a young person in whom we will invest our lives.
“But speak thou the things which become sound doctrine: (2) That the aged men be sober, grave, temperate, sound in faith, in charity, in patience. (3) The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; (4) That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, (5) To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed. (6) Young men likewise exhort to be sober minded. (7) In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good works: in doctrine shewing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity, (8) Sound speech, that cannot be condemned; that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you.”
1http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7834402.stm
2https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/malala-wins-nobel-prize
3Ibid
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