Do Hard Things

I don’t know about you, but when I turned 13 and officially became a teenager, it was a huge ordeal. I remember being seven years old, idolizing my babysitter and not being able to wait until I was just like her, complete with my hot pink nail polish, perfect boyfriend, and, best of all, that sweet independence. 13 seemed so distant and I was secretly afraid 16 would hide itself somewhere and never come. Wow, to call myself a teenager! To go to parties, have a boyfriend, my own car, and most of all, that make-up. Oh, the bliss of it all. Fun would be around every corner and life would be one party after the other.

Well, 13 came and went. Needless to say, instead of icing on the cake, it was one of my most difficult years. Later, I got saved and for sometime, I did not care about those old desires and Christ was my only focus.

However, things changed and little trials and temptations soon started creeping my way. One would prove to be my biggest trap; that term called teenager. A quick survey of history will reveal that the term teenager wasn’t even created until 1941. Before 1900, there was childhood and adulthood. No middle ground. Girls were ready for marriage by the age of 14 or 15, and 9 out of 10 boys were out of school by the same age and onto careers or universities! Today, you are considered extraordinary if you remember to feed your dog or make your bed at the age of 18. You are bestowed awards of responsibility if, imagine, you can keep your room clean for a couple of days. And if you can politely say, "thank you", oh my, just imagine the potential you contain!.

Ok, all that put aside, low expectations and the idea of the "typical teenager" have really wrecked some of the best years of our lives. At least it did some of mine. In today’s society, teens are EXPECTED to exist only for fun and not care about long-term affects, but only in living for the moment.

Most Christian young people aren’t any better. In fact, it can be quite dangerous because it is easy to convince yourself you are doing good just by comparing yourself to the rest of the teen culture. Your few steps ahead of them can seem like thousands. The most potential years of our lives are slipping through our fingers due to this lie that we are typical and we are categorized as being shop-o-holics, with headphones glued to our ears, and unable to function in a normal conversation.

Alex and Brett Harris’s book (Do Hard Things) addresses this issue and I’ve been reading it tonight and FELL in love with it. It’s super good and I highly recommend it. It’s very easy reading and it has tons of challenging ideas and thoughts. Basically, throw off that term typical teenager. It is a chain and needs to broken. These years will shape your future ones, either for better or for worse. To choose to keep on living selfishly as if there were no tomorrow, I can promise you, it will catch up with you later. You do not know what that tomorrow holds. It is not a guarantee that you will live until you are 80. You have no choice in the matter and your opinion does not count. You could die tomorrow and it’d be completely fair. Seriously though, consider it. What would you want your last thoughts to be? What do you want your life to be known for? What do you want to have accomplished? What do you want to have changed or done differently? You can’t just keep shoving it off and saying you’ll think about later, after you party a bit and then sober up. Life will not wait for you to decide.

There are so many things out there that we could achieve and so many higher goals then what the culture places before us, if we’d only (in the words of Brett and Alex) rebel against these low expectations. It’s not easy doing what we don’t want to do and not doing what we want to do. However, for the greater good, we should set aside ourselves and try to seek Christ and HIS standard in everything we do.

I’ll end with a quote I found in their book that I LOVE and is so going up on my bedroom wall ;-)

"Great faith is the product of great fights,

Great testimonies are the outcome of great tests,

Great triumphs can only come out of great trials"
Smith Wigglesworth (talk about a great last name)