Hey Teen, get Ready for the Real World

There used to be a time when teenagers didn’t exist.

Children went from boyhood to manhood with no teenhood dividing the two.

If you are over sixty years old, you may remember the days when there were no teenagers.

If you are between forty and sixty perhaps your parents or grandparents told you what life was like when teenagers did not exist.

My grandmother most certainly told me.

She was perplexed and saddened when I became part of this new and growing demographic called teenagers.

She was not sad because she missed out on something special. She was sad because I was missing out on something special. She was gathering the eggs and milking the cows before school and then went into the fields after she came home from school and worked until dark.

She did not know there were teen years until I came along. We were on the cutting edge of this new demographic. We had movies and video games. We also invented rock and roll. Pot, now called weed, was soon to follow and fornication (premarital sex) was the right-of-passage that validated manhood.

Most teenagers are unaware how they became a self-absorbed demographic.^[1] They are not familiar with their short-lived heritage. Most of them believe how they live is how things have always been and should be.

Teen, if this is how you think, then I’ve got some bad news for you. Your life was never meant to be the way I’ve described. If it is, then get ready. You’re in for the challenge of a lifetime. If you haven’t discerned this by now, be prepared. Shortly after your high school graduation, you will be introduced to what you should have been introduced to years earlier.^[2]

Last week I wrote the first part of this series, which I titled What to do after your parents blow it – 1.0. This week I want to finish that article, hopefully giving a biblical perspective on how the new teen demo should see and respond to life.

In both articles I’m interacting with Charles J. Sykes, and his rules for life. Based on how Sykes wrote his rules, it appears he did not have Christ or the Bible in mind. So I’m going to take what he said and tweak it a bit to fit a Biblio-centric framework–though what he said is tweetable.

I hope my interaction will provide a modicum of biblical wisdom and motivation for teenagers. Here are his first five rules, which I covered in the aforementioned article:   Continue at Rick Thomas