Finding Our Way Forward: When the Children We Love Become Adults

When our children turn 18, we hope to happily launch them into the world to become the adults we’ve been preparing them to be. Their pathway seems clear: most will go to college, find a vocation and then a true love, and settle into a comfortable life while we parents keep in touch through occasional phone calls, family gatherings, and surprise trips home for Christmas. But now more than ever, these expectations fail to acknowledge the significant challenges faced by many young people, from a pandemic to racial unrest to a climate crisis that is setting the world on fire, figuratively and literally.

While young people are consistently told they need to discern God’s calling, in Finding Our Way Forward, Melanie Springer Mock draws on her decades as a college professor and mom to four adult children to explore how finding our way means developing a more expansive understanding of calling for ourselves and for the young adults we love, one that moves beyond vocation and capitalistic enterprises to what God really calls us to: Seeking justice. Loving mercy. Walking with humility. Loving others. Loving God. As we do so, our relationships can be transformed as together we find our way forward.