Do you have more authorities in your life as a child or as an adult?
Listen to these profound words by Andy Stanley in his book The Seven Checkpoints…
Most teenagers long for the day when they can move out of the house and be free. Meanwhile those of us who are adults wish they could back! Why? We’ve learned from experience that getting older doesn’t mean having fewer authorities over us. Just the opposite.
Think about it. When you were two years old, who did you have to answer to? When you entered elementary school, who did you have to answer to? When you started middle and high school, who did you have to answer to? Now, as an adult, who do you have to answer to?
The point is simple yet profound: The older you get, the more arenas of life you enter, the more authorities you have. There is only one group for which this is not true: men and women in prison. Their only authority is the warden. But that’s certainly not freedom!
The human heart has a tendency to cry, “I don’t want anybody telling me what to do!” But authority is a fact of life. It isn’t going away. We can either help students learn to live with it and benefit from it or continue to watch as student after student chooses to resist authority and lose whatever freedom they have.
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That’s good stuff.
Agree or disagree? Thoughts?
