The teen years can be the most difficult of all years. Think back on your sixth grade through twelfth grade years. What do you remember? Unfortunately our lives are often colored by events that happen to us in our teen years. Maybe you were bullied. Maybe your parents got a divorce. All of life's embarrassing changes happen to our physical bodies during our teen years. And everything tends to be amplified and awkward. How do we help our teens get perspective and make changes for the New Year?
The New Year is a great opportunity to sit down with your teens and reflect on those things - good and bad - that occurred during the year. Grab an old calendar and take it apart, or on a large sheet of butcher paper, draw lines dividing into twelve equal parts. Lay out the year by month in sequential order from January to December. Using various colored pencils or markers, pick a color or group of colors to mark the bad events. Use another color or set of colors to mark the good events. Go through the year, month by month writing down the events. For every bad event that is remembered and marked, the teens need to come up with at least two good events to place on the calendar. For every bad event remembered, have the teens think of at least one good thing that happened because of the bad event.
What the teens will eventually discover is that the good events outweigh the bad and they will actually remember the good, more than the bad.
After that exercise, talk with your teens about the New Year as an opportunity to start over, make a few changes, and make the bad events of the past into good events of the future.
Grab a new calendar for the New Year and start making plans to implement changes and make hopeful plans.
-Jan Sullivan
AprilWord
Jan Sullivan received a Masters Degree in Youth Ministry from Asbury Theological Seminary. She served as a youth pastor for thirteen years in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. She published her first book, Forever Family, in July 2008. Her second, Never Alone, was published in August 2009. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her dog Abby and spends her time loving teenagers and consuming Christian fiction. Modeling her life after Christ, the great storyteller, Jan hopes that her stories will lead young people to make decisions to follow Christ.
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