This is an article about the time I spent with a ministry called Teen Mania in their program called the Honor Academy. It was hard to cram everything into one article that wouldn't be too long so I'm considering doing a part 2.
I think something like this would cause you a hell of a lot of confusion. I missed out on a lot of things in my teen years because my parents were very religious and so poor that I was denied a normal teenage life. I suppose that's how they pointed me toward the ministry which I am so glad that I rejected later.
It definitely put me in my own little bubble outside of actual reality and that really screwed me up. I'm watching my nephew get to be the age now that I was when I was doing that stuff and I feel glad to see him get to have a normal young adulthood and experience things he should at that age, even though it obviously causes me to see what I missed out on. As I said in the article even though I can't change the past sometimes it's hard not to look back and wonder what different direction my life could have gone in.
I only thought places like this existed in movies, but then I live in Australia where I have never heard of anything like this.
This ministry closed in 2015 but I'm sure there is something else that is almost exactly the same out there in the world. It's literally its own little bubble of reality inside of our own.