A View of Life from an Emerging Adult…

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(In all my 74 years of life, in my own decades of having lived through my own bits of joy and tumult personally and in our world, I need to clearly state, with deep thanks to our Creator, that from across the globe I am having some of my most fruitful mentoring moments with truly remarkable emerging adult men and women in these age groups we call Millennials and GenX. These exceptional souls represent a wide swath of personalities and capability, as well as ethnicities.

Rarely have I experienced deeper, more genuine hunger in others to live and grow into all they were designed to be by our Triune God. Unfortunate myths about this valuable generation are all too common. The emerging leaders I know in these societal classifications bring me deep hope for the future of our world…even those souls who are daring to be just a bit “creatively crazy.”

At the end of this post, written by one of the focused emerging adult leaders I mentor, with input from his sincerely caring wife, I will tell you about these two leaders who took the time to create this blog post. For them both I have the deepest of respect and care.

He writes these wise and focused words from the third decade of his unfolding life…20-30. What a sacred honor to be encouraging him and his wife forward in all the dimensions of their lives. — Wes Roberts)

We are about to take a deep dive into the emerging adult phase of life from 20-30 years old. This has been termed the “millennial” phase. It has been thought of as the “youth have gone wild” phase, the phase where the older two thirds typically look down and say, “How is our world going to survive with these young people running the show?”

This time, this early in the new millennium often defines an emerging adult as both tumultuous and yet breathtakingly beautiful. It is a time full of promises and littered with shattered dreams. This is a time of leaving home because you hate it and then wanting to run back to your parents and their bank accounts.

This is a time of falling flat on your face over and over again when you’ve been told your whole life that you are God’s gift to mankind. The 8 Dimensions of Life are all fighting for their time in the spotlight at every waking moment of every day

Creativity one minute. Vocational the next. Move over physical care, finance needs to steal the show! The “circle” of life looks much more like an “amoeba of confusion” as we emerge from the adolescent incubator and into the real world with all of it’s moving parts.

Writing about this emerging adult phase wouldn’t make sense without some kind of background as to who I am and what my story is. I was raised in a small mountain town and was the first of my family to graduate from college. All of my life I was told that college was my only choice; that if I had a degree I would be successful and I could do whatever I wanted to do.

College went incredibly well for me. I graduated top of my class with more awards and high profile internships than anyone from my department ever had. My resume might as well have been gold plated as far as I was concerned.

My wife was a scholarship athlete, top of her class in both her first and second bachelor’s degrees and somehow had time to maintain a thriving social life. We were married a few months after graduation and moved to the big city to start our careers.

Yahoo! We were primed and ready to attack with full confidence the dream jobs that we were always promised……….

……….but they didn’t exist.

Instead, we worked part time in selling suits, bussing tables, bartending, sweeping houses, nannying, gardening, catering, scanning badges at conventions and we even participated in a few medical trials (they paid well). As we were trying to keep the lights on and food in our bellies, the entitlement that we were groomed to believe for our wholes lives started to melt away.

What about my resume? I thought it was good! All of those awards and my stellar GPA…doesn’t anyone care about how hard I worked for that? My degree hanging on the wall was supposed to equal a job…right?

Wrong.

I specifically remember a night where my bride and I were at the end of our rope. We had racked up over double our salaries in credit card debt. I had just finished an unpaid internship that didn’t result in a job. My wife had applied for over 300 jobs and sent out over 500 resumes with no call backs and we had just started our student loan repayment program.

We sat on the couch in disbelief. Our accomplishments meant nothing to the real world. Our gold plated resumes, outstanding letters of recommendation, work ethic and interpersonal excellence landed us on a couch that my parents gave us as a wedding gift…the same one I’ve had since I was a freshman in high school…and we mourned who we thought we were supposed to be.

What we didn’t know at the time is that we were being refined. All of the puffery, the entitlement, and the false measures of a successful identity were slowly and surely being engulfed by Holy Fire.

The entire construct of who we thought we were completely vanished.  All 8 dimensions of our lives collapsed at once. Or so we thought.

The difference between refinement and incineration is that when something is refined, it is purified. All of the junk is stripped away and what’s left is pure and good.

Incineration, on the other hand, is meant to destroy everything, even the good stuff. Entirely.

When someone is being refined in their life, it feels no different than being incinerated. All 8 dimensions are in chaos. Everything hurts. Everything is connected and the connections aren’t making sense. The fire is the fire is the fire.

At this point…
…the point of total chaos and absolute fire,
is where a mentor has the opportunity to differentiate
incineration from refinement.

The emerging adult phase of life is a time of refinement for most of us. So many of the things that we expect were going to come true don’t.

We fail, really fail, for the first time in our lives with no safety net to catch us. We are shaken to our core as our identity is burned away exposing who we always were meant to be but never knew we were…and we need a guide to help us through.

Mentorship,
whole-life mentoring,
during the emerging adult phase ensures
that the refinement process
doesn’t turn into the incineration process.

Mentorship during the emerging adult phase
ensures that the mentoree has proper perspective
and guard rails on their refinement and is not crushed by it.

Mentorship during the emerging adult phase
exposes the core of who God made the mentoree to be
so that can be seen with life-giving clarity,
possibly for the first time in their lives!

When the junk in our lives is stripped away, all we are left with is what God gave us at our core–all 8 dimensions moving toward perfect unity–ready to be fully embraced and lived out with sacred purpose and passion. It is my personal experience that the emerging adult phase is about clarifying, identifying, and then acting upon who God has designed me to be.

Chase and Amy Moore

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