What Hope Is Available When Teenagers Leave Home?

Defining moments occur throughout life, and for a teenager who is leaving home to live separately from the parents at a college or university, this is one of those moments. Depending on the young person’s maturity, leaving home is one step in becoming self-directed.

However, parent’s counsel and help should continue until the young person’s maturity has advanced. Sending young people out the door with love, trust, and respect is a recipe for potential success in their academics and in future relationships such as marriage and family.

Parents must be willing to step forward and initiate appropriate boundaries throughout childhood and adolescence, which later will help a young person to leave home with peace and the parents’ blessing. “Bring up a child in the way he or she should go” and they will stay with that framework as they advance in years. 

This is God’s promise for parents and a sure hope to hold onto.    

_________ 

Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.

~Proverbs 22:6 New International Version

_________

Subscribe to the Attitudes Answers podcast on your favorite podcast platform to hear this and other 2-minute features 3 days every week.

How Does Facing the Truth Create a Defining Moment?

A defining moment can be a life-altering experience affecting how life is perceived from simplicity to profound truths. It’s as if a light has been turned on that penetrates an ever-dark crevice in your mind and soul. A defining moment is analogous to understanding something for the first time.

This happened to David when Nathan, God’s messenger, told him a story that illustrated a profound truth. It caused David to see himself as a thief who stole Bathsheba, with whom he had committed adultery. He then had her husband murdered.

Facing this truth was definitely a pivotal moment for David, which inspired Psalm 51. This Psalm was like an e-mail to God containing a confession of sin and heartfelt repentance. He promised to teach others about God’s mercy and forgiveness. This defining moment changed David’s self-centeredness by transforming him into “a man after God’s own heart.”

Can you imagine that?         

_________ 

I have sinned and done wrong since the day I was born. But you want complete honesty, so teach me true wisdom. Wash me with hyssop until I am clean and whiter than snow. Let me be happy and joyful! You crushed my bones, now let me celebrate. Turn your eyes from my sin and cover my guilt. Create pure thoughts in me and make me faithful again.

~Psalm 51:5-10 Contemporary English Version

__________

Subscribe to the Attitudes Answers podcast on your favorite podcast platform to hear this and other 2-minute features 3 days every week.

How Can You Respond to God's Defining Moment?

Samuel was three old when his mother Hannah left him with Eli, the high priest, to foster the child as a servant of God. Hannah had promised God she would do this. While Samuel was still a child, one night he awoke to a voice calling his name. This happened three times.

Eli served as father, teacher, and counselor to Samuel and was wise enough to realize a defining moment was occurring. Listen to Eli’s counsel to Samuel: “Go and lie down, and when you hear your name called by the Lord, say, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.’” For the rest of his life Samuel knew God had called him to be his servant.

If you are ready to experience God’s defining moment or have already experienced it, then how you are to respond to his purpose and directions will become clear. Your reward will be peace because you are not resisting, as well as assurance because all is well and right in your heart and soul – for God has spoken and you have listened.                     

_________ 

Therefore, if any one is in Christ Jesus, he or she is a new creation; the old has passed away, for the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

~2 Corinthians 5:17-18 Revised Standard Version

_________

Subscribe to the Attitudes Answers podcast on your favorite podcast platform to hear this and other 2-minute features 3 days every week.