Do Hard Things

I’m in a posting mood right now so I’ll just add another one on the crap pile today. I like how I get in these moods where I’m just like, “ok this time, I’m going to start posting every day,” but it never lasts more than a couple days. Then I go for months and months with nothing on here and then pick back up like there wasn’t a huge void there, and expect anyone at all to read it. I admit it’s silly. Maybe someone in like a month will stumble upon it. But I’ve sort of resigned to not caring anymore if anyone reads anything, though it would be nice. I write stuff all the time, it’s just never really presentable in any sort of coherent way. But I can probably muster something every now and then. Plus I found a way to post just by writing an email, so there isn’t the hassle of navigating to the freaking page every time and putting up with the slightly terrible interface that’s on here. So that’s nice. If anyone does actually read this, let me know, and maybe it will provide a little more motivation. But if not that’s fine, I’ll just keep talking to myself, or maybe let another year go by before I post again.

I notice that many people I know also exhibit this pattern of long periods of non-posting, and then a serious “get-back-on-track!” post that explains why they haven’t posted in forever. I’m not sure why we feel the need to explain why we don’t devote time to something that very few people care about, other than the need to feel like someone does care what we write. I suppose I do care some, and granted it might be pretty neat if people were actually looking forward to what I write next and checked it every day (although the use of the word “neat” may hinder that happening). But I am also accepting the cold hard truth that that will most likely not happen unless a lot of effort were put into it, which is probably not going to happen since blogging is not exactly one of the most important things on my agenda. Maybe the nice email-in feature will help out since I’m apparently too lazy to….enough already….on to the stinkin’ post.

I just read this new book by Alex and Brett Harris called Do Hard Things. It is targeted at teens, but the premise sounded really interesting so I thought I’d pick it up. Plus I used a gift card, so that’s good. The message of this book probably destroys my explanation of why I don’t post, since much of it has to do with being lazy, so I’ll work on that, but anyway... This book is geared towards teens and wants to goad youngins to not wasting their “adolescent” years (a term whose concept the authors pretty much dismantle and I agree with). It explains the pattern our society has set up to where nothing is really expected of teenagers because we don’t think they can contribute anything to society since they’re always playing Xbox, picking a fight, or texting their underachieving slackers of friends on their cell phones about things of absolutely no value to anyone in the universe. This is such a perceptive observation, but also a rather obvious one if you go the mall or to the movies on Friday night and see the culture of misfits and retards that our country is producing at an alarming rate (myself included, though my parents did a good job). The point here is not to insult them (because much of it is not their faults), but to point out how messed up our culture is where teenagers are merely thought of as being in “adolescence,” the concept of someone in transition from childhood to adulthood, somehow justifying the bane and uselessness that characterizes so much of their “adolescent” existence in teenage years. The problem in this worldview is that there is no cultural right-of-passage that exists in our society largely because no one can really give a definition of adulthood, or more accurately—maturity.

Biblically, maturity means that I take responsibility for myself, my actions, my soul, my wife, my kids, my family, my church, my society, my culture, and my world and say that I’m going to repent from worldly thinking and seek to live for the glory of God. In American culture, however, there is a complete abdication of responsibility in so many arenas of life (especially for men I might add), primarily (I would say) because there is no real prevailing truth to speak of in this world we live in, according to the philosophy of postmodernism which has permeated so much of our culture’s thinking. There’s nothing that anyone can agree on, since everyone has their own worldview/religion (or lack thereof) and we all seem to accept that no religion/worldview is better than another. The problem in logic here is simple, since we’ve all as a culture, bought into the religion of Secularism: that God has nothing to do with how we live; He’s simply concerned with “spiritual” things—we don’t realize the serious lack of sound reasoning here in that we want to claim that no religion is better than another, this itself being a religious statement in essence, since it cannot be empirically proven. That is another tangent I could go on, but I’ll save it for now.

The result is a lot of parents and families that raise kids into their teen years, but nothing is expected of them since we see them as in “adolescence,” meaning we see them as transitioning from immaturity to maturity by some sort of natural process I suppose. Apparently we think the maturity fairy will come in the night to set them free from their purposeless destination and give them a reason to live, instead of the parents imparting this to their children intentionally according to the design of God. A child is so much the product of its environment, especially its parents (though we should never discount the absoluteness of personal responsibility). This is not to mention the staggering amount of children raised in poverty and in disgusting situations where they have no fathers or their mothers are drug addicts, and the children just mimic the behavior of their parents because it is all they know.

The book basically says all this in a slightly nicer way, and gives teenagers a strong push in the right direction by showing many examples of teenagers “doing hard things,” such as helping a political candidate or starting an organization to end poverty. I admit that during junior-high/high-school that I felt much the same way, that I really didn’t have much of an idea what I was doing or any sort of real plan to speak of in life. This was largely due to my culture’s imparting its worldview on me, but I can accept full responsibility for my stupidity here, and ultimately it’s everyone’s responsibility as a human facing God in the end (though each will be judged according to his own areas of authority, such as a father for his children). I was strongly motivated by this book, even though I am not a teenager anymore, and the message is applicable to anyone in need of a kick in the rear. It reminds me that maturity is not something you get when you get your driver’s license or turn 21, or something stupid like that that our culture teaches. There’s plenty of old people we could say are in a state of perpetual adolescence, if you will. Maturity is something that is obtained through the grace of God as he molds his children, and something that is so greatly facilitated through parents leading their children into it. I’m thankful my parents taught me this. I also wish to do the same with mine someday, Lord willing.