Young adults frequently use the term #adulting on social media to celebrate their victories as they move from being children in their parents’ household into being independent functioning adults. How does the relationship between parents and their children mature into adults? How do young adults change adapt to respecting the authority of their parents while becoming independent? What’s it like to be a young adult? We cover these aspects of #adulting with guests Megan Miessler and Naomi and Matthias Wollberg.
In our first segment, guest Megan Miessler, MSW, LCSW, DCE with Lutheran Counseling Services in Winter Park, Florida, talks about how parents and children adapt to a new relationship as children mature into independent adults. The 4th Commandment still applies, but how does that change when the kids are adults? Megan talks through how both parents and their children can help each other move through this transitional time.
Listen to the first segment here:
In our second segment, guests Naomi and Matthias Wollberg are young adults and share their own personal experiences of maturing into young adults. Naomi and Matthias talk about how they learned to be adults, the joys and challenges of being on their own, and how marriage has also changed what they know and how they do certain adult tasks (like loading the dishwasher!).
Listen to the second segment here:
Naomi also has this advice for our young adult listeners:
If I had advice for anyone who was going into college or even into their post-grad life, venturing into adulthood, it would be to go to church. And not just go to church but go to A church. Singular. When I went to college, there were people around me that thought this was the time to “church shop.” They would hop around between four or five churches, rotating through depending on how late they stayed up Saturday night, where their friends were going, or what they felt like. College seemed like the perfect time for it because it was a life-limbo, of sorts, and they didn’t have to go with their parents or family – plus many other reasons. And I think, for the most part, people are satisfied and even applaud this because 1. at least they’re going to church and 2. they’re “making their faith their own.” (There are issues with “making their faith their own but that’s a whole can of worms). But in college and right when you leave college, there are so many big, life, #adulting things up in the air! If there was a time thus far in a young person’s life where they needed something constant and strong, it’s during college/post-grad.
You need a pastor, YOUR pastor. Someone who knows you and will consistently point you to Christ; not just on Sunday morning (which is incredibly vital) but every day. He is your father confessor and your shepherd. You need to be part of a congregation. College students are often isolated from anyone younger than 18 and older than 22, beside their professors. Being in a congregation allows twenty-somethings to be role models for the young ones and to learn from those older than them. Help with youth group, bake something for the potluck, be part of a community and listen to those who have walked the path of faith longer.
Finally, go to A church that gives God’s gifts Sunday after Sunday. Receive God’s Word and his sacrament. Many in college use this time to check out churches with different preaching, music, community-focus (church’s for millennials and whatnot) but when you do that, you are missing out on a crucial piece of the Christian life: Christ’s body and blood given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.
Whether you spend college drinking too much and sleeping through classes or you’re a straight-A student who sails through, college and immediately post-grad is a fluid, strange, and confusing time. You are, potentially, deciding what to do for the rest of your life. You are discovering who you are and what you want in relationships. You get wrapped up in majors, boyfriends and girlfriends, insurance, taxes. You get married and have kids. We post about these things on social media and add our #adulting. There’s nothing sinful about social media but it certainly turns us inward. It magnifies every thought we have and makes the world about us. Boy, do we need some perspective. And that perspective will be given by going to a Christ-centered, Lutheran church where you can look outside yourself by being part of a congregation and address the needs of others but, most importantly, where you can confess your sins and find forgiveness. Tangibly. As my own college pastor once said, “You are part of the body of Christ. And the body of Christ needs the body of Christ.”
Send in your family questions to Family@kfuo.org or call host Andy Bates at (314) 996-1519.
