Listening for Answers to the Questions Every Teenager Is AskingSample

Day One

The Three Biggest Questions

Scripture: Psalm 139

Every teenager is a walking bundle of questions. Sometimes kids’ questions leak out and are muttered aloud. More commonly, they remain bottled inside a teenager’s curious mind and conflicted soul. 

Over the last couple of years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups with over 2,200 teenagers, as well as in-depth multi-session interviews with 27 youth group high school students nationwide. 

While many questions are on the minds of today’s teenagers, almost every question young people are asking ultimately finds its genesis in these three big questions: 

Who am I?

Where do I fit?

What difference can I make? 

In other words, teenagers today are asking about:

Identity, which means our view of ourselves.

Belonging, defined as our connection with others.

Purpose, or our contribution to the world. 

One of the reasons we conducted this research was to help adults like you—and ourselves—move beyond assumptions to truly connect with teenagers. 

Assumptions keep us at a distance. 

Assumptions lead to judgment. This judgment allows us to comfortably dismiss what we experience as different by declaring it wrong. 

Young people feel this judgment. 

Truly listening to young people pushes us past our tendencies to assume and judge. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The beginning of love for others is learning to listen to them. God’s love for us is shown by the fact that God not only gives God’s Word but also lends us God’s ear.”

Listening helps us forge a new path across the generational impasse. It makes empathy possible. 

We practice empathy when we notice someone else’s emotions and respond to those emotions with feelings of our own. Empathy forces us to break old habits, to stop reinforcing the stereotypes we have. Empathy pushes past the superficial and creates a safe space for the real story to emerge.

It’s important to realize that many of us try to lead or love from a place of deficit. Doing our own work on identity, belonging, and purpose can open us up to empathize with young people on a whole new level. With that in mind, consider these questions: How do the three big questions bubble to the surface for you these days? What triggers your insecurity? What does it look like for you to lean into God’s truths about your identity, belonging, and purpose? 

Good self-reflection can help till the soil of empathy for others.