Episode #64: Clara - Letter four - Teenagers

Jan,16 2026

<-#63: Clara - Letter three - acceptance#65: Clara Letter Five - Editing ->

June 14, 1988

To the Families of the Fellowship,

Many letters have reached me this spring concerning your children. I hear the same worries in different handwriting:

They do not understand the message.

They listen to noisy music.

They spend hours before the television.

They doubt what we believe.

Some ask me to condemn these things outright, as if a list of forbidden objects could build a faithful heart. I cannot do that.

Did our Lord not say, "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them"? He did not add conditions about their songs or their games. Children arrive carrying the world they live in, not the world we wish they lived in.

Do you think our own home is silent? We hear music too. We own a radio. At times the younger ones in our care laugh at programs I do not understand. It would be easy to shut the door on all of it and call that protection. Yet a plant kept from the weather grows pale.

Teenagers can only mature by meeting the larger community. If we hide them from it, they will meet it later without us.

Instead, I urge you to sit beside them. Ask what they hear in those songs. Ask what draws them to those stories on the screen. Share a little of their world before demanding they enter yours. After that bridge is built, invite them gently toward the wisdom we treasure.

Most of all, give them something real to do.

A young person who is useful rarely has time to be lost. Let them learn the weight of honest work-even if only for a weekend. A field, a kitchen, a tool shed, a classroom: these are better teachers than any lecture.

And if a child's hands are not eager, then use their mind. Let them write, or sing, or design, or help the smaller children read. Productivity has many faces. What matters is that the teenager discovers the boundary of their own strength and steps beyond it.

When I was their age I cleaned cabins for our guests. I scrubbed toilets that no one else wished to scrub. I taught the little ones to swim and bandaged skinned knees. I did not always enjoy these tasks, yet they taught me that I had a place among adults.

The danger is not a loud song or a foolish cartoon. The danger is a life that asks nothing of the young. Emptiness seeks noise to fill itself.

If you wish your children to love our fellowship, show them that it is a place where they are needed, not merely corrected. Let them contribute before you require them to believe.

We must raise adults, not decorations.

With patience and hope,

Clara Mercer

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