I'm Glad I Didn't Let My 18-Year-Old Self Determine My Future
The September after I graduated high school, I packed up the VW bug and headed to Syracuse University with high hopes and only a vague idea of what I would do for the rest of my life. Because, as a high school senior, I did an independent study project trying to replicate laboratory creation of polystyrene, I slid into a chemistry major without giving it much thought.
Because my freshman year of college saw major campus protests, midway through the spring semester, I began to seriously question the relevance of my chemistry major. In light of larger social issues, I didn’t really think spending the rest of my life studying certain subatomic particles that could only be detected by an electron microscope would be that fulfilling. Who cares?
So I did a hard right turn and became an English Education major. Then a few months later I entered into a life-changing relationship with Jesus. Although I stuck with the English major, instead of becoming a teacher after graduation, I joined the staff of Cru, a Christian outreach organization.
I had three wildly different jobs over my nine-year tenure at Cru:
2 years working with college students in New York and New Jersey
5 years directing various internationally traveling bands
2 years serving in the international personnel office in the main headquarters
During our last two years on staff, my wife and I carefully evaluated long-term career objectives. I tentatively decided to go to seminary and ultimately become a church pastor. For various reasons, I decided instead on a profession in healthcare executive leadership and spent the rest of my career there.
By my count, including my three different roles within Cru, I made seven vastly dissimilar career decisions. If my choice as an 18-year-old would-be chemistry major was irreversible, my life would have been much different and ultimately, I believe, far less fulfilling.
Why am I telling you this?
We live in a time when some voices in our society are giving their blessing to 12-year-olds who might have ambivalence about their gender identity to undergo radically life-changing and irreversible surgery and/or hormone therapy to switch genders. I even saw a TV spot about an eight-year-old boy being encouraged by his parents to adopt a gender identity that contradicts his biological reality.
Allowing adolescents to physically transition their sexual identity is horrifying on three levels:
First of all, to my knowledge, there has never been a society in the history of the world that has believed that a man can become a woman or a woman become a man. This goes against every aspect of human history and natural science. Is our generation truly wiser than every other civilization that preceded ours?
Secondly, in a few cases, school officials encourage students to “explore” gender identity alternatives without informing their parents. If a student can’t even go on a field trip without a permission slip from a parent or guardian, how can some outside authority start a child down a path that could ultimately lead them to make permanent, life-altering decisions?
Finally, with no disrespect to adolescents, how could they possibly make a clear-headed decision about something so fundamental as whether they will spend the rest of their lives as a man or a woman? Middle school teachers will tell you that students who display gender confusion at that age often settle into their true biological gender a year or two later. And of course, every person should be treated with respect as someone created in God’s image.
Because society recognizes the relative immaturity of 12-year-olds, here are some things that, for their own protection and society’s good, they are not permitted to do:
Vote
Serve on a jury
Join the military
Get married
Enter a legal contract
Get a driver’s license
Buy an R-rated movie ticket
Drink alcohol
Buy cigarettes
Yet some in our society encourage their “right” to make a drastic decision to make changes to their bodies that can never be fully reversed.
If I, as an 18-year-old, made an initial career choice I subsequently changed six times, what sense does it make to allow an early adolescent to start down the unalterable path of drastic body change?
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“ . . . (w)hoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to fall away – it would be better for him if a heavy millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of offenses. For offenses will inevitably come, but woe to that person by whom the offenses come.”
Matthew 18:6-7 (CSB)