By PAUL LORENZ
paul.lorenz@mcleansborotimesleader.com
McLEANSBORO — Greg Mead wants kids to know that someone cares about them.
And if he has to rip apart a few phone books in the process, so be it.
Mead is a member of the Mike Hagen Strength Team, an organization that helps local churches by sharing the Gospel message and reaching people for Jesus Christ.
And though the Strength Team steers clear of outright Christian evangelizing during their school programs, Mead presented a talk on peer pressure Friday at Hamilton County High School that — combined with a few attention-grabbing feats of raw strength — seemed to reach its audience.
“Every day, teenagers are giving up on their life,” Mead said. “There’s never a time to give up on your life.”
Mead himself, he told the students, came from a pretty rough background.
“My father was a criminal,” he said. “He was in the Mob, he was a drug dealer, he went to prison.”
But “everything you are was given to you to make something specific out of your life,” he said.
Peer pressure, he explained, is “when someone around you exerts force — pressure — to do something that messes up your life.”
He told a story about two high school friends who “wanted to accomplish things in their life, but they also wanted to fit in.” The two went to a party where “everyone was drinking, everyone was smoking weed, and they gave in.”
The two left the party, one of the friends said he was too drunk to drive. The other, who was equally drunk, said, “I’ll drive.”
Their car veered off the road down a hill and crashed, fatally crushing one. The other friend survived, but was left with not only physical scars but the emotional scars of “having helped his friend leave this earth.”
But their story doesn’t have to end that way, he told the teens.
“If you will make good choices, you can make anything you want out of your life,” he said.
