One day a strange thing happened to my little boy. He turned into a teenager. The little boy I had known so well and was such good buddies with had slowly became a stranger to me.

There was a time when sitting with Dad on the couch watching Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and eating a bowl of popcorn was all he wanted to do. The things that I liked, he liked. The things he was interested in were things I had introduced him to.

I remember the bike rides around the lake when he was only five, and the way his eyes lit up when I told him he could stay up late with Mom and Dad and watch Peter Pan. He was excited about what I was excited about. This also included his spiritual growth.

We began each day with a devotional book for kids. There was a short story followed by a Bible reading. He loved it and I was able to disciple my son. But as he began to get older the cute little stories seemed, well, silly to him. He was growing up and his tastes were changing. Maybe a better way of saying it is that his individual God-given personality was beginning to bloom.

He began to change as God intended him to. His body began to change, his ideas began to change, and his culture began to change. The only thing that didn’t seem to change was me. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want him to, either. I was comfortable with bike rides around the lake. Now my son wanted to skateboard on ramps and go BMX bike racing. My son no longer hummed the cute movie tunes he had learned. Instead, he began to listen to popular music.

Then my son asked me to take him surfing. I watched on the beach as he learned to surf, my fins close at hand in case he got into trouble in the water. It was a part of his world, not mine. I didn’t mind that he went surfing, but I began to feel that we were drifting apart somehow, and it was sad.

When his music tastes began to change, I grew even sadder. He wanted to listen to the popular groups his friends listened to. I detested that music and let my feelings be known. Occasionally I forbade him to listen to certain music, and this caused an even deeper rift between us. When he would ask me if I wanted to hear a particular song he liked, I’d politely decline. Sometimes not so politely. He began learning the electric guitar and playing noise I had a hard time calling music. He began to spend more time with friends who were part of his world than with me.

I knew my son loved God and I knew he loved me, but the separation just seemed to grow more. We didn’t have much in common anymore. I brought this issue to God. What did I need to do? What was I missing? I wanted to grow closer to my son, not further apart. The opposite was happening and I didn’t know how to stop it. If my son grew away from me, would he also grow away from God? If my relationship began to sour with my son, how could I disciple him?

Finally, one day my son inadvertently let me in on the real problem. He had asked me if I wanted to learn to surf because he thought I would like it. I had always declined with a joke: “Son, I’d kill myself out there. Surfing isn’t my thing.” Then he said something I have never forgotten. “You know, Dad, I don’t want you to just take me to the beach and watch me surf, I want you to go surfing with me.”

His words hit me like a ton of bricks and the cobwebs around my brain began to clear away. Surfing was his world, not mine. All his life I had been inviting him into my world. When his interests began to change he had tried to return the favor by inviting me into his world. But I kept declining, and as I did, resentment and distance began to grow between us. He had entered my world, but I had been unwilling to enter his.

As a minister I knew the importance of cross-cultural ministry, being sensitive and eager to enter and respect the culture of the person you are trying to reach for Christ. As a teenager I had gone to a Navajo Indian Reservation to teach Vacation Bible School. While there I ate mutton cooked by Navajo women and sang songs I thought were strange. They weren’t my food and my music, but I respected the people who liked them. I wanted to enter their culture. Finally it dawned on me that I was refusing to go into cross cultural ministry to reach my own son.

For the first time I recognized that my son had adopted a culture foreign to me. His music, his interests, and his activities were strange to me. He could not stop liking his music or new interests any more than I could stop liking mine. I was going to have to make a change or watch us drift slowly apart and see my spiritual influence over him wane.

So I decided I would learn to surf because my son loved it and wanted me to be a part of his surfing world. And I wanted my influence in his life for Christ to continue. I love him and desperately want him to love God.

Ironically, as I learned to surf, I really began to enjoy it. More importantly, something that had separated us was now drawing us closer together. As this began to happen, we were able to talk more about life, faith, and God. I discovered that he wanted me in his world. He began to open up to me more, and the resentment that had begun to grow disappeared.

Then there was his music. Having been trained in the classics in high school, it was a little difficult listening to some of his punk rock music. In the past I told him the style of music was not important, only the words and messages the artists were trying to convey. But I wouldn’t even listen to it. Now, however, when my son asks me if I want to hear a song on a CD, or even one he just wrote, I stop and listen. While I don’t particularly like the style of music, he plays it well and I tell him so. This gives me the right to ask him what he thinks the artist is trying to say in his music, and whether or not he agrees with those ideas.

I learned that he doesn’t agree with the viewpoints of the artists; he just likes the music. I didn’t know this before. We talk now about how music is a medium through which ideas are conveyed. My son wants to start a band some day. I challenge him to think about how he can glorify Christ through his own music, lyrics, and lifestyle. And he listens.

I had been worried about my son and his walk with Christ. I think that for a time he was resentful toward me for ignoring or criticizing everything about his world. When I began to enter his world and involve myself in things he loved to do, I noticed his heart begin to change toward me and toward God.

A few years ago, my son was asked by his youth minister to go to Russia on a short term mission trip. I couldn’t even have imagined he would be interested. Not only was he interested, he was eager. He needed to begin to work on his testimony, and guess who got to help him? His over 40, out-of-shape surfing buddy, that’s who.

Jesus told us to make disciples of all nations. We are to go into foreign cultures and bring the gospel to them in a culturally relevant way. This is the task of parents with teenagers. The task will take you to some foreign places. It took me off the beach and into the water. It took me from listening to my music, to occasionally listening to Incubus and P.O.D. And I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Don’t be afraid of your child’s new interests. Don’t isolate yourself and hope it will go away. Enter his or her culture for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s sake and your children’s sake. Don’t be surprised if you find that you begin to appreciate things you had once disdained. And don’t be surprised to find that your teenagers have wanted you there all along. Surf’s up! |L