Julie_married_to_Thomas_but_not_a_Thomist@gmk_julie
3 years ago this month our son Joel (then 17) bought himself a plane ticket to Des Moines because he had heard there was a guy making a killing out there cleaning windows. He asked this stranger if he could come stay a few weeks and learn the business from him and the guy said yes.
Joel came back and started his own window cleaning business. It took off so fast he left it in the hands of his younger brother Nate and moved to Montana to start another branch. They both started offering other services by just saying yes whenever someone asked if they did something else, until Nate hit the jackpot installing Christmas lights.
A little over a year ago, Joel (newly married) and Nate (newly engaged) met up in Utah to get trained on these new permeant outdoor LED lights they were seeing around. Soon that's all they were doing. But they both felt they could be doing it a lot better if they had a better product to work with.
So they sold their other businesses, joined forces, designed their own product, and started manufacturing the steel tracking for it themselves. This year their younger brother Sam moved to Montana to take over Joel's location while Joel and his wife moved to Hawaii to start a new location there.
This past weekend they hosted their first seminar for dealers to come learn how to sell and install their product. Now bluEmber Lights could be coming to your state too!
This is not a commercial for their company. They obviously don't need mom's help in marketing.
This is a pep talk for everyone who has lost faith in the next generation of young men. It's a pep talk for those young men themselves. And it's a pep talk for their moms.
Teenage boys are gifted with an extraordinary amount of energy, drive, stamina, competitiveness, ambition, risk-taking, courage, and optimism. That is their natural state and unfortunately our culture seems to do everything it can to kill all of it. What we tend to see instead is laziness, complacency, entitlement, uncertainty, fear, anger, and blame-shifting. Such a state is a demoralizing, paralyzing trap. But I think many could break free by the grace of God. Dads obviously play the most crucial role in this but moms are often the main decision makers regarding education and training.
To those moms I would just ask them to reexamine their sons' educational environment. Is it making or breaking him? No amount of learning will be of any use if the process has left your son weaker, less capable, anxious, bitter, and unmotivated. The problem is as women, we tend to look at an environment through the lens of our own wants and needs. What would be the making of us could have the opposite effect on our sons. It could be the breaking of them.
Today is Memorial Day. Many of those who have bravely fought and died to protect us and pave the way for young men like yours to provide in freedom, were the same age as this month's high school graduates. Our country is still full of that caliber of youthful bravery. Let's not burry it too.