Hello
World! My name is Leaping Lizard (it’s a pseudonym) and I am the editor and
collaborator of The Thought Box. I am sixteen, love Ultimate Frisbee, create
digital art, play the piano and the alto and tenor saxophones (jazz is the
rule), listen to Phil Collins, and laugh at Brad Stine. I’ve been homeschooled
by my Mom for my whole life and am extremely excited to begin sharing my
thoughts and the thoughts of my colleagues with you. My colleagues include
other like-minded young adult homeschoolers.
But what do we DO? What
is our goal with this collaborative blog?
First
off, our goal is to grow, be grown and grow others. We hope, through writing
these articles, to challenge others and ourselves. This means that we need you
(the reader) to send us helpful insights, constructive criticism and the things
we missed (or –grammatically – that I as the editor missed). We hope that if
one of our articles speaks to you in a special way, or if you are able to use
any practical things we might share you would let us know. Our goal to grow to
be strong Christian men and women through the things we learn in writing these
articles.
Secondly,
we want to have something productive to do with our time. If we have a purpose
to our time it will be used more efficiently. I don’t know about the other
writers, but in my opinion there is no bigger waste than wasting time (except wasting
an opportunity to share Christ).
Remember
what I said earlier, we want to challenge and be challenged? Another of our
goals is to raise the bar. Many people today refer to young adults as
teenagers. I dislike that term. It implies that young adults (people between
the ages of about 13 and 20) are not adults. That those in our age group get a
‘buffer-zone’ between childhood and adulthood where we should be free from any
responsibilities (both with our bodies and with our time) and get to lollygag
around until we get sent off to college to party, I’m sorry, re-learn what we
should have learned in Highschool. This is the mentality that is killing our
culture. Do you know when the word Teenager (not teen age which means the same
thing as old age for a different age group) was first used? The first published
date was 1941 but it did not become popular until around the 1950s. Let’s do a
little math; if a person was thirteen in say 1970 – a little buffer for the
word to take effect – they would be about 50 in 2007 – when the economy started
really tanking – this generation is now in control of our nation (please note
that I am stereotyping – if you are of this generation and have a different
mentality, or were raised by parents with a different mentality, I mean no
disrespect).
I recently read an
article called “The myth of the Teenager*”. The author stated
that before teenagers there were youths (young adults) who “knew that adult
life was different than a child’s life. They planned to grow up, leave
childhood behind and become adults.”* Teenagers did not have the same view of
the future. Beyond the teen “world there is no adult life . . . no future with
goals.”* Did you catch that – beyond the teen years there is no future with goals. Now, look at the
economy, the mentality of the nation; ‘let’s post-pone this decision so we
don’t have to deal with it.’ When young men and women are not asked to ‘Do Hard Things’ (see Alex and Brett Harris’s book with the
same name) they won’t. And they won’t when they have larger responsibilities;
unless they refuse to stoop to the low expectations.
Probably
one of the most quoted verse in regards to this issue is 1 Timothy 4:12 “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the
believers an example in speech,
in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (ESV). When quoted, many times
we will focus on the first half of the verse, “Let
no one despise you for your youth” But the second half is just as, if
not more so, important as the first half “but set the believers an example. .
.” Paul is saying that in order for people not to look down on us they have to
look up to us. Another great verse is
in 1 Corinthians 13:11 “When I was a child, I
spoke like a child; I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I
became a man, I gave up childish ways” (ESV). When I became a man I gave
up childish ways. There is no middle ground. You are either an adult or a
child. I once heard a teen described as “a three year-old and a thirty year old
in the same body.” That is a great description of a teen: while they have the
capability to be mature, they frequently act like squabbling toddlers.
I
could go on about how George Washington was the official surveyor for a whole
county in Virginia; charting back woods and hiking through uncharted forests
alone at the age of seventeen. Or how the rest of the founding fathers were
still those of teen age when they began doing big and important things and how
they weren’t the exception – they were the rule. But I won’t. I want to finish
by saying that those of teen age have a choice; will we be young adults with a
plan for the future, or will we be teenagers and act like three year olds? Will
we look up to men and women of valor, or will we choose to emulate the
lifestyle of prosperous teenagers (rock stars and the like)? The decision is
the youth’s, but the parents, the pastors and their peers all have an important
role to play in making that decision. So, if you’re a youth what will you
choose? And parents let me play the same tune one more time, “Train up a child
in the way he should go, and when he grows old he will not depart from it.”
Alright,
the rant is over, you can come back. The Pseudonyms for our other writers are The Comma Queen and Haiku. Please check
back on Tuesday for Haiku’s bio and then Thursday for The Comma Queen’s.
Leaping Lizard
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