It's 22.20hrs on Tuesday night, I've just finished watching CSI-Miami on C5, and nipped online to send an email to my best friend, whom I met in a meeting that although scheduled for 90 minutes eventually lasted 5 hours. We both knew at the end of the meeting that we would be friends for life. Whilst composing my email to said best friend, I clicked onto Sacred Space. Now I know you'll all find this unbelievable, but Sacred Space is even more famous than Pioneer Woman's blog. And what's the prayer for today concerned with?* Teenagers. Here is the opening paragraph, in case you can't be bothered to click onto the link.
"The adult Christ is hardly intelligible to children before adolescence. But for teenagers he incarnates the highest values of all: freedom and love. As he appears in the Gospel he is the freest of people: unpredictable, and alarming the respectable; a shocking, revolutionary figure whom society eventually found too dangerous and had to put away; a tender and compassionate figure, reacting warmly and spontaneously to all he met; a strong and frightening figure, contemptuous of petty regulations but open to everything living, ready to change the world. Above all, he was a man of supreme interior freedom, not driven by unconscious needs, pressures or anxieties, but doing what he wanted to do, his father’s business. He was the only person who realised fully all that a parent can mean to a child: not merely Law, but the model and the promise of an independent free existence."
My struggle and ambition as a parent must be to realise this final sentence: to be all that a parent can mean to a (teenage) child.
Good.
I can do this.
I'm on the right track.
Come and join me in this journey.
* It grieves me to end a sentence with a preposition
