Call to help teens at Arlington Hts. prayer breakfast

His job is dealing with teenagers, but Mike Hatch says he gets object lessons from his 2-year-old son, Matteo, as well as Jesus.

Hatch, director of Northwest Cook Young Life, a Christian organization that works with students of Northwest Suburban High School District 214, spoke Thursday at the Arlington Heights Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast.

Matteo likes to play “gotcha,” says Hatch. That means the toddler runs from his father while Hatch chases him on hands and knees until Matteo “stops, laughs his head off and runs into my arms.”

The unconditional love that Matteo enjoys so much is similar to what Jesus offered a woman of bad reputation he met at the well in Samaria.

And this is what young people crave and adults should provide them, he said.

“The systematic abandonment by adults in kids’ lives gives them the message they are left to figure out adult life on their own,” he said, and this is what turns them to the empty wells of drugs, alcohol and parties.

Hatch told of his own high school life that looked perfect from the outside with popularity, athletic success and decent grades. But at home his family was falling apart. His parents were separated, and he and his brother once called police to break up a fight between his parents.

“Every day I went to school and felt that I had to fake it,” he said.

Hatch gives a lot of credit to a Young Life representative named Buck who spent time with him and his friends.

“Buck was a physical representative of Jesus for me by loving me unconditionally, saying hi, being there, eating lunches with me and my buddies — a lot.”

He urged the adults at the breakfast to consider helping today’s teens by getting involved through one of the local youth groups.

About 80 percent of the people with reservations for the breakfast made it there early in the morning the day after so many snow closings.

Among the absences was Ken Whitney, music director of First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, scheduled to provide inspirational music. His wife had a baby Wednesday, and the ambulance that took her to the hospital reached their South suburban home only with the help of two snowplows, said Jane Schieber, a member of the church choir who filled in for Whitney.