Teen angst

I love mornings. Not too early, but rationally early. A crisp morning is fine. Good coffee, smelling all wonderful and hot going down. A newspaper. Always a newspaper. Prayer. Moments of bliss.

But on occasion, it's not quite so lovely. Take this morning for example. I'm reading away and I happen on these headlines in my morning newspaper: Pair of teenagers arrested in Harvey man's killing; N.O. teen stabbed to death and there was a photo of a 15-year-old girl from Terrytown who has been missing for three days.

It's a tough, tough thing when life, bad life, comes so early.

What has happened in this worn economy, dark cultured society is that we've made adulthood a teen kinda thing. Doing a bit of research for this blog, I read this, "Teens today don't fear the law because they don't think they will get caught. And if they do, they know they have a good chance of getting off because they are tried as teens and not adults. We have to get tougher on crime. There should be a law that everyone over eleven years old will be tried as adults. That way more teens would be discouraged from committing crimes. They would know that murder would get them a very long sentence instead of staying in juvenile hall until they are eighteen. If we want to cut down on teen crime, we have to have tougher laws."

Just the phrase, teen crime, is enough to send me into passive delirium.
"There should be a law that everyone over eleven years old will be tried as adults" simply saddens me.

I'm not sure there is an age that is more likely to abandon God than the 18-30 year olds. Perhaps we need to take that to "everyone over 11."

God knew this when he told Isaiah, "Do we dare say to our parents, 'why did you make me do this?' You have not right ot question me about my children or to tell me what I ought to do (God says). I am the one who made the earth and created human beings to live there. By my power I stretched out the heavens; I control the sun, the moon, and the stars."

That's so true. But getting a teenager to surrender when they're just trying to understand how to be in control is a difficult thing even for God. So God allows them to make their own mistakes.

I was reminded yesterday that my youngest daughter, who was so adamant that she be allowed to make her own mistakes when she was a teenager, is now a mother who won't even allow her 1-year-old plus daughter to sleep away from home lest she be troubled.

It's a difficult thing this teenagerdom, for both the teens, the parents, and what now appears to be their attorneys.