Listening for Answers to the Questions Every Teenager Is AskingSample

Day Seven

Christ-Centered Purpose

Scripture: Hebrews 12:2; Philippians 1:6

Of the three big questions that change teenagers, our interviewees had more coherent descriptions of their purpose than their identity or belonging. Our hunch is that since students are handed specific scripts from adults about their expected gift to the world, they find it easier to repeat back those lines. 

Yet their plans still often felt a little bit flat. 

They often lacked the vividness that comes from Christ’s full-color vision of being changed by grace to change our world. 

Our lives don’t become meaningful because we’re helping others. 

Or following the right rules.

Our best answer to the question, “What difference can I make?” is that our lives matter because we are part of the ongoing plot of what God has done, is doing, and will do in our world. Our best personal narratives come from embedding our stories in the ultimate narrative of God’s story. 

In After Virtue, Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre asserts, “I cannot answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ unless I first answer the question, ‘Of which story am I a part?’”

Today’s young people are channeling their passion to serve through protests, marches, sit-ins, and fresh cries for equity and justice using social media. 

But does service transform them? 

As you team with young people in justice work, you’ll increase its impact by focusing on the quality of reflection rather than the number of results. 

Frederick Buechner wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Each of the teenagers you’re closest to has different sources of “deep gladness.” We each resonate with different plotlines in God’s grand adventure of righting wrongs. 

When you take time to help a young person figure out the best intersection between the world’s deep hunger and their own deep gladness, you are helping to add color, nuance, and direction to their questions of purpose.

Most of all, as you spend time with the teenagers in your life, keep paying attention. Keep listening. Become a student of the young people around you. They have so much to teach all of us about how they’re wrestling with the three big questions. 

The questions will certainly change them—but the journey will also change you. 

Looking back over this devotional, what are the one to three insights that stand out to you most as you think about your relationships with teenagers?