Like Dew Your Youth

The moment an adolescent appears in a family (intrudes is what it feels like) the home is no longer ordinary. Because it takes place so suddenly, and is so unprecedented and unheralded, parents assume that something exceptional is going on in their homes. They characteristically look with envy on other families whose adolescent children almost always appear (in public) well-adjusted — “blue mountain” families. But there are no well-adjusted adolescents. Adolescence is, by definition, maladjustment. And getting adjusted is a strenuous and often noisy process.

The most significant growing up that any person does is growing up in Christ. All other growing up is a preparation for or ancillary to this growing up. Biological and social, mental and emotional growing up is all meant to be put to the service of growing up in Christ. The human task is to become mature not only within ourselves but in our relationship with God and with other persons.

My purpose is to block any approach that reduces adolescence to a problem that must be solved and insist that it is an experience to be entered into by the middle-aged as well as by the young as a means for growing up.

There is no point at which we become exempt from the realities of “growing up in Christ.”

Parents of adolescents, it seems to me, are not at their best when they do the right things or say the rights things, but when, in faith, they plunge into the process of growth.

One thing stands out: these parents, seriously, honestly, joyfully follow the way of Christ themselves. They don’t define adolescence as a problem and try to solve it. They are engaged in vigorous Christian growth on their own and permit their children to look over their shoulders while they do it.

The task of the parent, in other words, is not to confront directly the problems of the young and find the best solutions to them; it is to confront life, and Christ in life, and deal with that. A parent’s main job is not to be a parent, but to be a person. There are no techniques to master that will make a good parent. There is no book to read that will give the right answers. The parent’s main task is to be vulnerable in a living demonstration that adulthood is full, alive, and Christian.

The task of adolescence is to learn how to make decisions and to become accustomed to the identity the decisions produce.

Identity is the product of decision. Each adolescent makes the decisions that produce the life that is uniquely his, or hers. Each of them becomes the person who made those decisions. As they gain strength in choosing, each of them accumulates an assurance of being herself, or himself, and no other.

Self-identity must be formed apart from the parent. Which means that the parent is going to feel left out, rejected, defied, and unappreciated. Parents cannot, as they are accustomed to doing through the childhood years, share each hurt and be closely involved in each detail. There must be some alienation during the adolescent years.

But once the child reaches adolescence the parents must spend much more time and attention on the way they exercise authority, and correspondingly less on worrying whether obedience is forthcoming.

Young people learn to be trusted (and to trust) much the same way they learn to walk, not by first demonstrating it as an achievement, but by being encouraged, supported, and assured by those who have been through it themselves. The parental support is critical. If there is only a punishing, blaming, mistrusting reaction when young people show themselves to be untrustworthy, they will scarcely have the courage to develop those capacities and strengths that are worthy of trust.

Parents can encourage a context in which a decision about a job is not an economic or an aptitude decision but a decision about the kind of life an individual wants to live.

If we don’t see how everyday work in some way or another is a response to the command “‘Go... and make disciples ...’” we are going to become either very discontented with the meaning and worth of our work, or else very careless and blase about our obedience to Christ. Many people never make the connection between their daily work and our Lord’s command and spend their working days “making a living” and their weekends and evenings trying to make up for the lack of meaning in their jobs by doing “Christian work.”

In every decade Christians have been engaged in hundreds of occupations at all levels of society, each doing the job well “unto the Lord.” And disciples have been made — who knows how many? The entire earth, not only geographically, but vocationally, has been the mission field for the Christian worker. If all this had been left only to “the religious,” to ministers and missionaries, vast areas would have been neglected. Pastors and priests have had vital roles, but are neither more nor less important than any other occupation in which individuals live out their discipleship in a vocation. But

And so the first thing that parents must understand about drugs is that there is almost always a spiritual element in adolescent drug-taking. We can never comprehend it if we view it simply as a matter of wrongdoing, breaking the rules, or rebelling against parental or societal standards.

Forgiveness proceeds by accepting the person who committed the sin. It aggressively initiates a new movement of love toward that person. It gathers him, or her, back into the relationship of love, saying, “You are what is real, not the sin. Nothing you or anyone else can do will separate you from me.”