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• THE CROSSROADS OF LIFE

Let’s take a look at the first important reason. So here you are. You’re young. You’re free. You have your whole life before you. You’re standing at the crossroads of life and you have to choose which paths to take: Do you want to go to college or graduate school?

What will your attitude toward life be?

Should you try out for that team?

What type of friends do you want to have?

Will you join a gang?

Who will you date?

Will you have sex before marriage?

Will you drink, smoke, do drugs?

What values will you choose?

What kind of relationships do you want with your family? What will you stand for?

How will you contribute to your community?

The paths you choose today can shape you forever. It’s both frightening and exciting that we have to make so many vital decisions when we’re so young and full of hormones, but such is life. Imagine an eighty-foot rope stretched out before you. Each foot represents one year of your life. Teenagehood is only seven years, such a short span of rope, but those seven affect the remaining sixty-one, for good or bad, in such a powerful way.

What About Friends?

Take your choice of friends as an example. What a powerful influence they can have on your attitude, reputation, and direction! The need to be accepted and be part of a group is powerful. But too often we choose our friends based on whoever will accept us. And that’s not always good. For example, to be accepted by the kids who do drugs, all you have to do is do drugs yourself.

It’s hard, but sometimes it is better to have no friends for a time than to have the wrong friends. The wrong group can lead you down all kinds of paths you really don’t want to be on. And retracing your steps can be a long and hard journey. I have a close friend who fortunately had enough common sense to drop his old friends for some new ones, and he shared the following: The summer before my senior year, I had a really good friend named Jack. The month before school started, he went to Europe and to my surprise came back with a powerful drug called hashish. Neither of us had ever experimented with drugs before. He began to invite me to join him in using this drug with a group of his “new” friends. He also started the “24 club,” where you would sit in a circle and drink twenty-four tall bottles of beer, one after another, until they were gone. I knew there was no future in any of it and that eventually he would self-destruct if he continued using these drugs. However, he had been my best friend since grade school, and I didn’t have a lot of other close friends. I didn’t want to be a loner, but I also didn’t want to end up where I thought Jack was going.

I remember finally deciding (sadly) that it was just too risky to hang out with him anymore. And so my senior year I had to start over making friends. At first I felt awkward, didn’t fit in, and felt dumb being alone. But after a few months I made friends with guys who had similar values and were also a lot of fun.

My old friend Jack turned into a druggie, barely graduated, and eventually drowned in a swimming pool while intoxicated. It was very sad, but I was grateful I had the guts to stick with the right decision and think long-term at a crucial time in my life.

If you’re having trouble making good friends, remember that your friends don’t always have to be your age. I once spoke to a guy who seemed to have very few friends at school, but he did have a grandpa who listened to him and was a great friend. This seemed to fill the friendship void he had in his life. The long and short of it is, just be wise when choosing friends, because much of your future hangs on who you hang out with.

What About Sex?

And what about sex? Talk about an important decision with huge consequences! If you wait until the “heat of the moment” to choose which path to take, it’s too late. Your decision has already been made. You need to decide now. The path you choose will affect your health, your self-image, how fast you grow up, your reputation, whom you marry, your future children, and so much more. Think this decision through … carefully. One way to do this is to imagine how you hope to feel on your wedding day. How do you hope your future mate is leading his or her life right now?

In a recent poll, going to movies was ranked as the favorite pastime of teens. I love movies, so I’m right there with you. But I’d be careful about the values they promote. The movies lie, especially when it comes to issues like sex. They glamorize sleeping around and having one-night stands without acknowledging the potential risks and consequences. The movies don’t show you the life-altering reality of contracting a disease like AIDS or STDs, or becoming pregnant and having to deal with everything that brings with it. They don’t tell you what it’s like living on minimum wage because you had to drop out of high school (and the father of the child is long gone and sends no money) or what it’s like spending your weekends changing diapers and caring for a baby instead of cheering on your volleyball team, going to dances, and just being a kid.

We are free to choose our paths, but we can’t choose the consequences that come with them. Have you ever gone water sliding? You can choose which slide you want to go down, but once you’re sliding, you can’t very well stop. You must live with the consequences … to the end. A teenage girl from Illinois shared this story: I had one bad year—my freshman year—when I did everything from drinking, drugs, older guys, bad crowds, etc., mostly because I was frustrated and unhappy. It just lasted a year, but I am still paying for those past mistakes. No one forgets and it’s hard to have to deal with a past you aren’t too proud of. I feel as though it will haunt me forever.

All kinds of people still come up to my boyfriend and say, “I hear your girlfriend drinks, and smokes, and is easy.” And things like that. But the worst is probably the fact that every time I have a problem of any kind, I immediately think, “Maybe if I hadn’t done that, everything would be okay.” What About School?

What you do about your schooling can also shape your future in a major way. Krista’s experience goes to show how beginning with the end in mind in your educational pursuits pays off: As a junior in high school, I decided to take an Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. history class. At the end of the school year, I would then have a chance to take a national exam to qualify for college credit.

Throughout the school year the instructor bombarded us with homework. It was difficult to keep up, but I was determined to do well in the class as well as pass the national exam. With this end in mind, it was easy to put forth my full effort on each assignment.

One assignment was particularly time consuming. The instructor asked each student to watch a documentary on the Civil War and write a paper on each segment. The series lasted ten days and each segment was two hours long. As an active high school student, it was difficult to find the time, but I did. I submitted the report and discovered I was one of only a handful of students who watched the series.

The day of the exam finally arrived. The students were nervous and the air was thick. The test administrator announced, “Begin.” I took a deep breath and broke the seal on the first section—multiple choice. With each question, I gained confidence. I KNEW the answers! I completed the section several minutes before I heard, “Pencils down.” Next we would each write an essay. I nervously opened the seal of the essay book and scanned the questions quickly. I answered a question related to the Civil War using references from my reading as well as the documentary. I felt calm and confident as I completed the exam.

Several weeks later I received my score in the mail–I had passed!

• WHO’S IN THE LEAD?

The other reason to create a vision is that if you don’t, someone else will do it for you. As Jack Welch, former teen and current business executive, put it, “Control your own destiny or someone else will.” “Who will?” you may ask.

Perhaps your friends or parents or the media. Do you want your friends to tell you what you stand for? You may have fine parents, but do you want them to draw up the blueprint for your life? Their interests may be far different from yours. Do you want to adopt the values portrayed in soap operas, magazines, and on the big screen?

By now you might be thinking, “But I don’t like to think about the future so much. I like to live in the moment and go with the flow.” I agree with the live in the moment part. We ought to enjoy the moment and not have our heads too far in the clouds. But I disagree with the go with the flow part. If you decide to just go with the flow, you’ll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You’ll end up doing what everyone else is doing, which may not be your end in mind at all. “The road to anywhere is really a life to nowhere.” Without an end in mind of our own we are often so quick to follow anyone who is willing to lead, even into things that won’t get us far. It reminds me of an experience I once had at a 10K road race. Some other runners and I were waiting for the race to start, but no one knew where the starting line was. Then a few runners began walking down the road as if they knew. Everyone, including me, began following. We just assumed they knew where they were going. After walking for about a mile, we all suddenly realized, that like a herd of dumb sheep, we were following some doughhead who had no idea where he was going. It turned out that the starting line was back right where we had begun.

Never assume that the herd must know where they are going, because they usually don’t.