So this week, my eldest son’s chores have included assembling a bookshelf from Ikea (a true test of manhood), raking and bagging part of the yard, and mowing at the neighbor’s. I admit to a small degree of happiness when he asked, “Mom, where’s a hex wrench?”
See, he’s 14 now. And that means it’s T minus four years till a vast assortment of his advice will come from college students just as clueless as he will be. So this morning, before he crawled out of bed, I sent this list of life skills for teens to my husband for printing.
Playing mom-of-teenager (plus any other hats, like, oh, working mom) can get a little cray-cray. Sometimes I feel like to live in this century is to live within in a blur, like we’re on a merry-go-round that’s too fast, yanking us off-center. As Westerners (and I lump myself into that), when asked how life is, half of us will answer “busy”. But what if the tyranny of the urgent keeps me from the critical?
So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.
It’s a classic moment in our family lore, though I rightfully roll my eyes when it’s retold. (Again.)
It had been one of those days. I was trying to stomach a failure of mine in my job, and I sat at the kitchen table with my husband, shaking my head. I explained that this past year, one of God’s key messages for me seemed this idea of making “no graven image”. I had to be really careful, I told him, not to remake God as 
What I loved recently in the U.S.: some conversations with parents of kids my husband and I had in the youth group back in the day. (When I was…more youthful.) We leaned forward with them over our Pick Twos from Panera, or perhaps chatted in the slanting afternoon light of their living rooms.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
How would Jesus tweet? Social media as love, Part III–FREE GIVEAWAY
Missed the first two posts? Get Part I here and Part II here.
6. Love = Telling the truth. …In love. Is a status update artfully alighting upon all my strengths the same as telling the truth? Like a camera, we all choose what we zoom in on. But is it possible we’re airbrushing our lives, and creating a climate of unnatural expectations? (Check out this post on perfectionism vs. pursuing excellence.) Though we may look for sympathy when our kid smears poop on the wall or throws a fit in Target’s housewares aisle, our lives on social media generally lean toward the photoshopped side of things.