Just Do Something (excerpt from Kevin DeYoung book of same title

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will, by Kevin DeYoung (Moody Press).]

I grew up playing with Tinkertoys. Like most Americans over the past one hundred years, ourfamily had the classic long tube full of sticks, woodenwheels, and colored connectors. Hitting the market in 1913, Tinkertoy (now owned by Hasbro) has sold about 2.5 million construction sets per year for almost a hundred years. The impetus for Tinkertoy construction sets--which initially sold for sixty cents and were called by the less-than-catchy name "Thousand Wonder Builders"--came from Charles Pajeau and Robert Petit, who dreamed up the toy as they watched children tinkering around with pencils, sticks, and empty spools of thread.

And apparently, so do adults.

In the book After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion, Robert Wuthnow describes twenty-one to forty-five-year-olds as tinkerers. Our grandparents built. Our parents boomed. And my generation? We tinker. Of course, asWuthnow points out, tinkering is not all bad. Those who tinker know how to improvise, specialize, pull things apart, and pull people together from a thousand different places. But tinkering also means indecision, contradiction, and instability. We are seeing a generation of young people grow up (sort of ) who tinker with doctrines, tinker with churches, tinker with girlfriends and boyfriends, tinker with college majors, tinker living in and out of their parents' basement, and tinker with spiritual practices no matter how irreconcilable or divergent.

We're not consistent. We're not stable. We don't stick with anything. We aren't sure we are making the right decisions. Most of the time, we can't even make decisions. And we don't follow through. All of this means that as Christian young people we are less fruitful and less faithful than we ought to be.

Granted, youth tends to come with a significant amount of youthfulness. And with youthfulness comes indecision and instability. Young adults who tinker are not confined to any one generation. Baby boomers, and probably even builders (the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II), tinkered around with God and life when they were young adults. The difference, however, with my generation is that young adulthood keeps getting longer and longer. It used to be that thirty seemed old and far removed from youth, but now it is not uncommon to hear of folks "coming of age" at forty.

Consider this one statistic: In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men completed all the major transitions into adulthood by age thirty. These transitions include leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. By 2000, only 46 percent of woman completed these transitions by age thirty, and only 31 percent of men. It's stunning for me to think that less than a third of men my age are done with school, out of the house, married with kids, and have a job that pays the bills. "Adultolescence" is the new normal.

Now, I know there are lots of good reasons why someone may still be in school past thirty. After all, multiple college degrees take time. And I realize there are legitimate reasons why a thirty-year-old might have to live with his parents (e.g., illness, unexpected unemployment, or divorce). Concerning marriage, maybe you have the gift of celibacy. And as for a family, maybe you've been trying to have kids but can't. There are lots of reasons for delayed adulthood. I understand that. Just because you've been on the planet for one-fourth to one-third of your life and still haven't completed "the transition" to adulthood doesn't mean you're automatically a moocher, a lazy bum, or a self-indulgent vagabond.

But it could mean that. It is possible that your "unparalleled freedom to roam, experiment, learn (or not), move on, and try again" has not made you wiser, cultured, or more mature. Perhaps your free spirit needs less freedom and more faithfulness. Maybe your emerging adulthood should . . . I don't know, emerge.

But let me be clear: This is not a book just for young people. I'm not going to attempt a generational analysis of my fellow thirtysomethings. I'm not issuing a new manifesto for baby busters and mosaics. This book is much simpler than all that. This is a book about God's will--God's will for confused teenagers, burned out parents, retired grandparents, and, yes, tinkering millennials . . . or whatever we're called.

The hesitancy so many of us (especially the young) feel in making decisions and settling down in life and therefore diligently searching for the will of God has at least two sources. First, the new generations enjoy--or at least think they enjoy--"unparalleled freedom." Nothing is settled after high school or even college anymore. Life is wide open and filled with endless possibilities, but with this sense of opportunity comes confusion, anxiety, and indecision. With everything I could do and everywhere I could go, how can I know what's what? Enter a passion to discern "God's will for my life." That's a key reason there is always a market for books about the will of God. I bring up this whole business of adultolescence because it is related to the spiritual issue of God's will. You'll find in this book some of the typical will-of-God fare--how to make wise decisions, how to choose a job, whom to marry, etc. But answering these questions is not really the aim of this book. My goal is not as much to tell you how to hear God's voice in making decisions as it is to help you hear God telling you to get off the long road to nowhere and finally make a decision, get a job, and, perhaps, get married.

Second, our search for the will of God has become an accomplice in the postponement of growing up, a convenient out for the young (or old) Christian floating through life without direction or purpose. Too many of us have passed off our instability, inconsistency, and endless self-exploration as "looking for God's will," as if not making up our minds and meandering through life were marks of spiritual sensitivity.

As a result, we are full of passivity and empty on follow through. We're tinkering around with everyone and everything. Instead, when it comes to our future, we should take some responsibility, make a decision, and just do something.

Robert Wuthnow. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Ibid., 11.

The line in quotes comes from Christian Smith, "Get a Life: The Challenge of Emerging Adulthood," Books & Culture, November/December 2007, 10.

How To Stand Out: Define Your Strengths

Good post found at:

http://www.careerealism.com/how-stand-out-strengths/

Though passions are powerful, Caspari  finds that defining your strengths in order to articulate them to your potential employer is another way to help a job seeker stand out.

“Everybody has strengths,” said Caspari.

Caspari works with a lot of at-risk individuals, both youth and adult.  She’s found they typically feel they don’t have a whole lot to offer a company because they’ve been in jail or prison. They don’t think they can get hired, which sets them up for failure.

“A lot of people don’t see their own strengths,” said Caspari. “Whether you’ve done time or not, getting a fresh perspective from a life or career coach can help you notice things about yourself you never thought could be strengths in the workplace.”

But how does one even begin to define strengths? One of Caspari’s courses, “Looking at Strengths,” helps answer this question by asking five questions that help individuals pinpoint what they are good at.

The questions include:

• What kind of activities do I like to do?
• What makes me happy?
• What are my talents and skills?
• What are my accomplishments?
• What are my best qualities?

In Caspari’s experience with this activity, the hardest question to answer for most people is, “What are your accomplishments?” She recalls a time when she was working with an at-risk kid who was having a hard time finding any accomplishments in his life. His aspiration was to be a professional soccer player, and he participated in soccer teams, but felt that wasn’t considered an accomplishment because it was something that was easy for him to do.

“It really broke my heart because here’s a kid who, very obviously, was beaten up by life,” said Caspari. “We don’t allow ourselves to see our wins or successes.”

She went on to say that a good way to get to know our strengths is by having an accomplishment story ready for an interview. “In our accomplishment stories we might think of one of our accomplishments that brings a number of our skills together and share it in a way that is a short story that brings those strengths to life,” said Caspari.

Saying things like, “I’m an organizer,” “I’m a team player,” “I’m adaptable,” and so on doesn’t tell employers what your strengths are. If you bring up a specific instance where your strengths really shined, telling that story will definitely help you stand out from the other people who tell employers the same old list with generic words that don’t really tell employers who you are.

“Depending on who you are, you want to highlight yourself in different ways,” said Caspari.

As a leader of a non-profit organization that teaches life skills, Caspari never considered how organized she really was. “I worked alone a lot,” she said, “and I had no one to compare myself to, but I’m really organized and because it comes so naturally to me I don’t even see it at times.”

It’s important to ask ourselves what our strengths are because the more we get to know ourselves, the easier it will be to show other employers who we are and what makes us stand out from other candidates.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

About Belen Chacon

Belen is a journalism graduate student at California State University, Northridge. She spends her time interning wherever she can and tweeting her heart out. You can follow her @journobelen.