Like Dew Your Youth: Growing Up with Your Teenager

By Eugene Peterson

Adolescence is a gift, writes author Eugene Peterson. "God's gift, to the parent in middle-age. This 'gift' dimension of adolescence is my subject. For adolescence is not only the process designed by the Creator to bring children to adulthood, it is also designed by the Creator to provide something essential for parents during correspondingly critical years in their lives. Christian parents are most advantageously placed to recognize, appreciate, and receive this gift God so wisely provides."


In Like Dew Your Youth Peterson shows how adolescence is a time for parents to enjoy a deeper, richer relationship with their children and for both parents and children to grow in their relationships with Jesus Christ. In addition to its wealth of positive, effective ways to deal with many of the problems and pains of growing up, this insightful book offers an understanding of parent-adolescent relationships that will help promote an atmosphere of communication, growth, frankness, forgiveness, love, and harmony in the home. Study questions at the end of each chapter help readers apply Peterson's practical, Bible-centered teaching. There are also tips for using this material within the framework of parental support groups.

Like Dew Your Youth provides a much-needed balm against the fear and anxiety bred by traditional views of this exciting period of life and properly orients parents and teenagers within this God-provided environment for spiritual growth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 7, 1994
• ISBN: 9781467418898

Eugene Peterson

Eugene H. Peterson (1932-2018) was a pastor, theologian, professor, poet, and author of over thirty books, including his bestselling translation of the Bible, The Message, and his memoir, The Pastor. In 1963, he founded the Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, where he served as pastor for nearly three decades before retiring in Montana with his wife, Jan.

Book preview

1

The Gift of Adolescence

Author C. S. Lewis once wrote to a troubled parent that the only ‘ordinary’ homes seem to be the ones we don’t know much about, just as the only blue mountains are those ten miles away. ¹

The moment an adolescent appears in a family (intrudes is what it feels like) the home is no longer ordinary. Because it takes place so suddenly, and is so unprecedented and unheralded, parents assume that something exceptional is going on in their homes. They characteristically look with envy on other families whose adolescent children almost always appear (in public) well-adjusted — blue mountain families. But there are no well-adjusted adolescents. Adolescence is, by definition, maladjustment. And getting adjusted is a strenuous and often noisy process. There are families who manage to maintain a facade of decorum, but when we get a close look at them we find a jumble of colorful and jagged detail: exposed rock, crashing streams, lightning-struck trees, mossy meadows, sudden storms, surprising blossoms, bark in a dozen and more textures — adolescence is insistently various and energetic, and it pulls everyone in the vicinity (and most emphatically parents) into the wild and wonderful scenery.

Adolescence is also a gift, God’s gift, to the parent in middle-age. This gift dimension of adolescence is my subject. For adolescence is not only the process designed by the Creator to bring children to adulthood, it is also designed by the Creator to provide something essential for parents during correspondingly critical years in their lives. Christian parents are most advantageously placed to recognize, appreciate, and receive this gift God so wisely provides.

When I hear the statement Children are a gift of God, images of cuddly, gurgling infants and well-scrubbed boys and girls in happy play rush into my mind. It never occurs to me to think of sullen adolescents — door-slamming fifteen-year-old daughters or defiantly argumentative sixteen-year-old sons.

Infants are manifestly God’s gifts. In them, God brings into our lives a sense of miracle, a mood of wonder, a conviction of worth, a readiness to grasp responsibility. At the very time in life (young adulthood) when it is most easy to suppose that we are in control, that the world owes us a living, that through our education and training we have reduced our environment to something manageable — at this time God gives us a child to restore our sense of creaturehood, our own sense of being a child of God, so we may experience a renewal of the prerequisite condition for entering the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:1-3).

Only very stubborn unbelievers can be in the presence of a newborn infant and maintain the arrogant pose that they are the creator, the ruler, and the savior. For these few moments, at least, when the child is freshly with us, it is hardly possible to reduce our experience to the explanations of biology or the diagrams of sex education. The simple fact of life far exceeds anything we can engineer, control, or explain. And we ourselves become aware of our creaturehood — not makers, not managers, not mothers, not fathers, but children of God. We apprehend the world through the forms of infancy and we are in Eden again. We discover elemental reality: we find what it means to care, to nurture, to respond. The delights of touch, sound, sight fill the day. We see what God has created, how He loves, the designs of His providence, His glory. The infant is a gift of God by which we are given renewed access to the forms of childlikeness through which we receive our Lord and enter the kingdom of God.

But the adolescent, though not so obviously, is no less a gift of God. As the infant is God’s gift to the young adult, so the adolescent is a gift to the middle-aged. The adolescent is born into our lives during our middle decades (when we are in our thirties, forties, and fifties). In these middle decades of life we are prone to stagnation and depression — the wonders of life reduce to banalities and the juices of life dry up. For many there is a feeling of letdown. The surging strength of early adulthood has not carried us to eminence. Failures and disappointments accumulate. Even when there is outward success, there is often a corresponding inner dryness, a sensation of hollowness, a shriveling of hope. The ideals and expectations of earlier years are experienced as fatigue.

What I had not foreseen

Was the gradual day

Weakening the will

Leaking the brightness away.²

Stephen Spender

And then God’s gift: in the rather awkward packaging of the adolescent God brings into our lives a challenge to grow, testing our love, chastening our hope, pushing our faith to the edge of the abyss. It comes at just the right time. All the realities that have become hackneyed and trite are suddenly in fresh form before us, demanding response, requiring participation.

The most significant growing up that any person does is growing up in Christ. All other growing up is a preparation for or ancillary to this growing up. Biological and social, mental and emotional growing up is all meant to be put to the service of growing up in Christ. The human task is to become mature not only within ourselves but in our relationship with God and with other persons.

Three biblical texts focus the task:

And the child [John] grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel. (Luke 1:80)

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man. (Luke 2:52)

… until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children…. (Eph. 4:13, 14)

John grew up. Jesus grew up. We grow up. Saint Paul’s summary counsel is that we … grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ (Eph. 4:15). All growing up is drawn into the act of growing up into Christ. Growing up in Christ centers and models all growing up.

Adolescents exhibit the process of growing up into adulthood in a particularly vivid form. Their parents are unavoidably involved in it. Every parent of an adolescent is thus provided with a gift — a kind of living laboratory in which to take the data of growing up, work experiments with it in personal ways, and then reexperience it in an act of faith to the glory of God. Parents don’t always look at it this way. Not infrequently, they are heard to complain about it. Many stoically stick it out, assured by the experts that adolescence is self-curing and will be over in seven or eight years. They never open the gift; they never enter the laboratory.

But adolescence is a gift, God’s gift, and it must not be squandered in complaints or stoic resistance. There is a strong Christian conviction, substantiated by centuries of devout thinking and faithful living, that everything given to us in our bodies and in our world is the raw material for holiness. Nature is brought to maturity by grace and only by grace. Nothing in nature — nothing in our muscles and emotions, nothing in our geography and our genes — is exempt from this activity of grace. And adolescence is not exempt.

My purpose is to block any approach that reduces adolescence to a problem that must be solved and insist that it is an experience to be entered into by the middle-aged as well as by the young as a means for growing up. But there is this difference: what the young are forced to go through by virtue of their biology, the middle-aged willingly embrace by virtue of their faith (or willfully refuse in their unbelief). And the growing up of parents is not to a mark on a measuring rod but to the stature of the fulness of Christ.

I write from the context of parent and pastor. As a parent I have been through the experiences of adolescence three times; as a pastor, dozens of times. I didn’t begin with the conviction that adolescence is a gift; it is an acquired conviction, but one that deepens with every fresh encounter. And it is not a conviction that does not receive repeated testings, with many accompanying doubts. All the same, the conviction survives. So I write not to instruct parents on how to guide their children through the years of adolescence with as little discomfort and embarrassment as possible, but to encourage parents to embrace the experience offered to them by their adolescent children as a gift from God, a means of grace for themselves to mature into wisdom and favor with men and God. By calling adolescence a gift, I don’t mean to suggest that if we only look at it rightly it will turn out to be a lot of fun for everybody concerned. Grace does not preclude pain and bewilderment — biblically, it usually includes it. But God-ordained means of grace, regardless of appearances, and any feelings we might have toward them at the time, get us to the end that God intends for us, in this case the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

Getting born, compared to growing up, is easy. A few hours of pain, preceded by a few months of discomfort, and then birth which, even though accompanied by an enormous amount of work, is full of gratification. The sheer wonder of new life, the marvel of the intricately beautiful human body, the delights of affection — all these provide parents with unsurpassed joys. But growing up is difficult. And it drags on, it seems, endlessly. At adolescence it is complicated bewilderingly.

Prior to adolescence, parents are used to being in nearly total control of their children. They are both stronger and wiser during those years. Parental strength and wisdom are necessary for the child’s survival. The child needs, rarely questions, and ordinarily appreciates the physical protection, the intelligent guidance, and the emotional warmth of parents. Adolescence abruptly introduces new factors. The stable supply-demand equilibrium which worked throughout childhood is thrown into disorder — the market goes haywire. Parents do not improve family life at this juncture by doing more vehemently the same things they have been doing all along. Strength and wisdom adequate through childhood years no longer work. New ways of sharing strength and new ways of communicating insight are needed. In order that we may function adequately as parents to an adolescent, new skills have to be developed. But they are not the skills of parenting that can