From here:

I awoke this morning to the confirmation of a classmate’s death. Alex Heidengren was serving as a councelor at Honey Rock camp when he passed away. His body was found in the lake. Alex leaves behind his parents and four siblings. I didn’t know Alex personally, and I’m sure he had no clue who I was, but we would smile in greeting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Once when we passed each other in chapel and once when we passed going to classes. His greeting brightened my day simply because he was always so happy. It’s so easy to believe that he’s still alive, ready to go back to school and his friends. I wish I had taken the time to get to know him more than just that passing three second greeting. I cannot imagine the pain his family must be feeling, my thoughts and prayers go out to them.

Divers found Alex’s body in Long Lake off the shore by the Village around 9:30pm. John Vandervelde had to tell the news to the staff and students when they got back from Presque Isle later that night, and he also had to tell Alex’s family. HoneyRock was obviously hit very hard by this news. It’s the first time we’ve had a death on camp. During breakfast you could have heard a pin drop in the dining hall, which is normally very noisy. I had met Alex over Spring Break, and he was a part of the HoneyRock community. Being in the middle of this community right now I really feel the loss. I’ve always felt like there’s been a supernatural protection around HoneyRock, and it’s been hard to process these events. However, HoneyRock has been amazing during this time. I could literally feel the healing happen as the community pulled together, praising and worshipping God even as much of the staff were sobbing with grief. It’s been exactly a week, and even though the pain still lingers, the student development groups and the Passage students have brought new life and energy.

Read it all and do pray for the family and especially for the memorial service on Monday.

Memorial Service:

Monday Aug. 17 at 11am, with visitation beginning at 10am
Chippewa Evangelical Free Church
239 Braun Rd., Chippewa Twp. Beaver Falls, PA 15010

Memorial Donations:
In lieu of flowers, the Heidengren family requests donations to any of the following ministries of your choice:

HoneyRock Camp of Wheaton College
Scholarship Fund in Memory of Alex Heidengren
8660 HoneyRock Road, Three Lakes, WI 54562
In memory of Alex Heidengren on memo field of checks

Beaver County Christian School
Scholarship Fund in Memory of Alex Heidengren
510 37th Street, Beaver Falls, PA 15010
In memory of Alex Heidengren on memo field of checks

Prince of Peace Church
Alex Heidengren Memorial Fund
111 Cherryton Street, Aliquippa, PA 15001
Alex Heidengren Memorial Fund

Doug Carson, the teen’s high school principal at Beaver County Christian, said Mr. Heidengren’s parents had been visiting on Saturday with him and his older brother, Jonathan, who is to be a senior this fall at Wheaton.

The parents were on their way home when camp officials notified them that their son was missing.

Mr. Carson said the family, as well as the high school community, all have reacted as they believe Alex would have. At an impromptu prayer service Sunday at the high school, about 70 students, staff and friends prayed with the Heidengren family.

“More than one student testified that God is sovereign and in control, and that things that are unclear or inexplicable are in God’s hands. That was Alex’s hope. His hope was in Jesus Christ. There’s no question about that,” Mr. Carson said today.

Read it all.

[Alex] Heidengren’s body was found in Long Lake, just off of camp grounds late last Saturday night.

Honey Rock Program Director John Vandervelde says the 18-year-old was participating in the summer leadership program, and was a model counselor. According to Vandervelde, “Alex had a ton of friends, he realy loved young people and kids loved him. He was an incredible counselor and just a great member of our community.”

According to Vandervelde all of the campers left Honey Rock last Friday, but the counselors and staff will be at camp until the end of August.
He says once the dive team recovered Heidengren’s body, psychological counselors were immediately called in to help everyone grieve.
“We are moving forward as best we can. We know that the best thing for us as a community and the best way to honor Alex is to just keep moving forward,” says Vandervelde.

Read it all.

[Alex] Heidengren is the son of the Rev. John and Blanche Heidengren. John Heidengren is rector of Prince of Peace Church in Hopewell Township.

Alexander Heidengren, according to his Facebook page, was a 2008 graduate of Beaver County Christian School in Beaver Falls. Monday, many condolence messages were posted by friends, one reading, “It’s good to know you’re in heaven, Alex, but we’ll miss you and the great person you were.”

A.J. Young of North Sewickley Township, who graduated from Beaver County Christian School a year after Heidengren, recalled the upper hallway of the school filled with the sound of Heidengren playing piano.

“He was always practicing for something,” Young said. “He was extremely skilled at music,” adding that Heidengren never used sheet music.

“His whole lifestyle was to worship God,” Young added. “I can’t honestly think of anyone who would have a negative thing to say about him.”

Read it all.

Update: There is a little more here also.

From here:

The Wheaton College community is saddened by the death of sophomore Alex Heidengren. Alex, 18, had participated as a counselor in the Summer Leadership School at HoneyRock in Three Lakes, Wisconsin. Local authorities began a daylong search for him on Saturday morning, August 8, when camp officials became aware that he was missing. His body was discovered late Saturday evening, in Long Lake by underwater cameras operated by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. An investigation into the cause of death is ongoing.

Other departments participating in the search and recovery operations included the Three Lakes Police and Fire Departments, the Oneida County Sheriff’s Department, the Wisconsin State Patrol Air Unit, Oneida County Emergency Management, and canine units from Three Lakes Police Department and the Vilas County Sheriff’s Department. Volunteers also searched the area.

HoneyRock is the Northwoods Camp and Campus of Wheaton College (IL), located in Three Lakes, Wisconsin.

From here:

The Prince of Peace Church family mourns the loss of one of our own: Alexander James Heidengren, son of The Rev. and Mrs. John Heidengren We appreciate the overwhelming response of prayers, love and support that goes out to the Heidengren family and our website will be updated as information becomes available.

Sitting in my inbox this morning, the terrible news that a seminary friend and his wife lost their young son:

With deep sadness I must share with you that we received word this morning of Alex Heidengren’s death. Alex, the 2nd oldest of John and Blanche’s children, was working as a counselor at a Christian Camp. He was a young man of great faith and a passion for Christ, a gift for worshipping God through music, who loved his family and friends well. He will be greatly missed.

Please keep John and Blanche and children Jonathan, Katie, Nate and Nick in your prayers before our Father God.

A picture of Alex is here.

John Heidengren, Alex’s father, serves in this parish in the Pittsburgh area.

I would be very grateful if you could lift up this family in prayer today–KSH.

If you think it’s difficult to be pro-life in a pro-choice world, or to be a disciple of Jesus in a sea of skeptics, try advocating for young marriage. Almost no one empathizes, even among the faithful. The nearly universal hostile reaction to my April 23, 2009, op-ed on early marriage in The Washington Post suggests that to esteem marriage in the public sphere today is to speak a foreign language: you invoke annoyance, confusion, or both.

But after years of studying the sexual behavior and family decision-making of young Americans, I’ve come to the conclusion that Christians have made much ado about sex but are becoming slow and lax about marriage””that more significant, enduring witness to Christ’s sacrificial love for his bride. Americans are taking flight from marriage. We are marrying later, if at all, and having fewer children.

Demographers call it the second demographic transition. In societies like ours that exhibit lengthy economic prosperity, men and women alike begin to lose motivation to marry and have children, and thus avoid one or both. Pragmatically, however, the institution of marriage remains a foundational good for individuals and communities. It is by far the optimal context for child-rearing. Married people accumulate more wealth than people who are single or cohabiting. Marriage consolidates expenses””like food, child care, electricity, and gas””and over the life course drastically reduces the odds of becoming indigent or dependent on the state.

Read it carefully and read it all, it is the cover story from the latest Christianity Today.

In response to Archbishop Nichols’ comments on social networking and youth, an interesting take on “thick” and “thin” communities. Listen to it all (approx. 2 3/4 minutes).

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the Archbishop of Westminster also voiced his concerns about the loss of loyalty and the rise of individualism in British society which he said threatened to undermine communities. He picked out footballers for acting like “mercenaries” and expressed his fears over moves to relax laws on assisted suicide.

He said that relationships are already being weakened by the decline in face-to-face meetings and conversations over the phone.

“I think there’s a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community.

“We’re losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person’s mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.

“Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.”

The archbishop blamed social network sites for leaving children with impoverished friendships.

Read it all.

Caught this one on the morning run. Take the time to watch it all. Those of you with connections to youth ministry, this video is the kind of thing all youth groups needs to be challenged to watch and discuss.

Read it all.

I caught this in the morning this week by accident–it is important. Watch it all.

Watch the whole touching and encouraging story.

Unwed young women who attend or have attended religious schools are more likely to have abortions than their public school peers, according to a new study.

The study also found “no significant link” between abortion and personal religiosity””defined by perception of religion’s importance, frequency of prayer and other religious activities.

Read it all.

Teens whose parents let them stay up after midnight on weeknights have a much higher chance of being depressed or suicidal than teens whose parents enforce an earlier bedtime, says research being presented today at a national sleep conference.

The findings are the first to examine bedtimes’ effects on kids’ mental health ”” and the results are noteworthy. Middle- and high-schoolers whose parents don’t require them to be in bed before midnight on school nights are 42% more likely to be depressed than teens whose parents require a 10 p.m. or earlier bedtime. And teens who are allowed to stay up late are 30% more likely to have had suicidal thoughts in the past year.

Read it all.

The 2011 World Youth Day will be much like its precedents — “a party that the Holy Father convokes” — but the role that networking will play in the event is sure to give it a special flair, according to its director of communications.

Santiago de la Cierva, founder and director of the “Rome Reports” TV agency and a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, was asked by the host of ’11 Youth Day, Madrid’s archbishop, Cardinal Antonio Rouco Varela, to be the director of communications.

De la Cierva said the first thing that came to his mind in response was, “Is there no one else?” But, kidding aside, the communications professor admitted these kinds of opportunities are like trains that pass by: “Someone tells you, ‘get on board,’ and with a little faith, one can realize that even though it makes your life more complicated, though there are obviously no free evenings, no weekends or vacations ”¦ deep down you realize that it’s worth it.”

De la Cierva says leading communication for World Youth Day will be “a fantastic adventure.”

Read it all.

[Mark] Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, says Generation Y, ages 16-29, has been shaped by exposure to computer technology since elementary school.

The cost, he says, outweighs the convenience. Kids are writing more than ever online or in text messages, but it’s not the kind of narrative skill needed as adults, he says. “Those forms groove bad habits, so when it comes time to produce an academic paper ”¦ or when they enter the workplace, their capacity breaks down.”

Social networking sites can give young users “the sense of them being the center of the universe,” Bauerlein says.

That gives them a distorted understanding of how the world works, he says.

Read it all.

Kavya Shivasankar doesn’t want a cell phone, and she doesn’t like the makeup applied for television appearances that began early Friday, the morning after she spelled “Laodicean” to win the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The 13-year-old from Olathe, Kans., likes her violin, Indian dancing, swimming, biking, playing with her little sister Vanya and spelling, of course.

“I’m going to really miss spelling this next year because it’s such a big part of my life,” Kavya said Friday.

Read it all.

What punctured this rose-tinted illusion of mine was the knowledge that these diminutive figures giggling and sitting Indian-style on the carpet before me might also be viewed as incubating adolescents. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d swear the world knows not an eviler soul than an angry, angst-ridden, hormonally intoxicated teen. And if this little pigtailed girl is anything like the rest of her gender, in just a few years’ time she will unfortunately morph into an eye-rolling, gossiping, ostracizing, sarcastic, dismissive, cliquish ninth-grader, embroiled in the classic cafeteria style…[verbal aggression] of adolescent female social politics.

If that strikes you as misogynistic, rest assured it’s merely an empirical statement. (Rest assured, also, that I’m afraid I have much in common with this tactical style, and I have great respect for more refined Machiavellians, so I’m not casting stones here.) In fact, over the past few decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines””including developmental psychology, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology””have noted a striking difference in the standard patterns of aggression between reproductive-aged males and females. While teenage boys and young male adults are more prone to engage in direct aggression, which includes physical acts of violence such as hitting, punching and kicking, females, in comparison, exhibit pronounced social aggression, which includes such obnoxious things as mentioned in the various acts of…[verbal aggression] listed above.

Read it all.

Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church in the same neighborhood as Simeon, is outraged at the violence.

“What kind of crazy day do we live in, where our children are afraid to come home and go to school?” Pfleger says.

Outside of his church, Pfleger flies the American flag upside down ”” something the U.S. Flag Code states should only be done as a signal of distress and a dire need for help.

“Well, this is a dire need,” Pfleger says. “This is a distress signal we’re putting up saying we need help. We want to sound the alarm; we want a call for helping us deal with children being shot down in our city streets.”

I caught this last night in the car on the way to an appointment–heartbreaking. Read or listen to it all.

Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other ”” the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days. Teachers joke about “one hour” and “six hour” hugs, saying that students hug one another all day as if they were separated for the entire summer.

A measure of how rapidly the ritual is spreading is that some students complain of peer pressure to hug to fit in. And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching ”” or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class ”” have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five, are often baffled by the close physical contact. “It’s a wordless custom, from what I’ve observed,” wrote Beth J. Harpaz, the mother of two boys, 11 and 16, and a parenting columnist for The Associated Press, in a new book, “13 Is the New 18.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be any other overt way in which they acknowledge knowing each other,” she continued, describing the scene at her older son’s school in Manhattan. “No hi, no smile, no wave, no high-five ”” just the hug. Witnessing this interaction always makes me feel like I am a tourist in a country where I do not know the customs and cannot speak the language.”

Read it all.

They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company ”” almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.

Read it all.

Eric Cieslewicz has spent the last couple of months drumming up business.

Faced with dismal employment prospects at traditional teen-friendly employers, the 18-year-old has turned his passion for percussion into a money-making venture.

The Milford, Ohio, high school senior set up a website promoting his services as a drum instructor, printed business cards and spread the word that he was open for business.

Read it all.

Technology in all of its forms – social networks, smartphones, the Web, instant messaging, on-line gaming – is a net loss for today’s young people. At least according to one group of Silicon Valley 8th graders.

“It’s bad for us, but it sure is fun,” says Eric Bautista, 13, one of the students in Sister Jolene Schmitz’s junior high school class at Resurrection School in Sunnyvale, California.

Admittedly, this informal survey offers, at best, only anecdotal evidence. Still, it is pretty shocking that a group of young teenagers, all of them technologically very astute, and living in the very heart of Silicon Valley, would come to such a conclusion.

These kids, born about the time the Internet became widely adopted, live within blocks of where the Intel microprocessor, the Apple computer and the Atari video game were all invented. They spend their days (and nights) surfing the web, playing on-line games and instant messaging. Most have cell phones in their backpacks. And many have at least one parent who works in the electronics industry.

Read it all.

A nice piece about a local school doing a world of good–watch it all.

High school students, beware! College admissions and financial aid officers in California and elsewhere may be peeking over your digital shoulder at the personal information you post on your Facebook or MySpace page.

And they might decide to toss out your application after reading what you wrote about that cool party last week or how you want to conduct your romantic life at college.

According to a new report by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling, about a quarter of U.S. colleges reported doing some research about applicants on social networking sites or through Internet search engines….

Read it all.