Living Hope

Program:

Our teenage years are often the most confusing and puzzling years of our lives.  Somewhere between the times when we enjoyed playing with Tonka©  trucks and baby dolls, and when our greatest sense of joy came from shopping for a new car or going on a date with someone special … and on to the future when marriage, family and career responsibilities loomed ever so closely … something happened.  “Innocence” was lost, and life didn’t “feel” so good any more.

“Quit Digging! A Lifeline of Hope for Troubled Teens” is a down-to-earth, easy-to-follow, behavioral management program for troubled teens.  Focusing on their value and worth as a human being, “Quit Digging!” will bring your teen back to the basics, discovering how we learn and how s/he got to be the way s/he is.    “Quit Digging!” then follows through to helping them understand how to recognize and confront thinking errors and replace them with more healthy and positive choices.   “Quit Digging!” offers insight into:

• Discovering the Real “You”
• How You Got to be That Way
• Identifying Thinking Habits
• Breaking Free from Bondage
• Becoming Men of Honor and Women of Grace

Goals:

In order to identify the goals established for this program, I need to explain an event that occurred while ministering in a TDCJ prison unit some years ago.  An inmate came up to me and showed me in black and white just how he feels about himself:  “O Lord, have mercy on me in my anguish.  My eyes are red from weeping; my health is broken from sorrow.  I am pining away with grief; my years are shortened, drained away because of sadness.  My sins have sapped my strength; I stoop with sorrow and with shame.  I am scorned by all my enemies and even more by my neighbors and friends.  They dread meeting me and look the other way when I go by.  I am forgotten like a dead man, like a broken and discarded pot.  I heard the lies about me, the slanders of my enemies.  Everywhere I looked I was afraid, for they were plotting against my life.”  (Psalm 31: 9-13)  The grief and desperation expressed in this Psalm and by this inmate, speak for themselves.  

There is no greater goal in life than to help one person change his life and set it upon a healthy, constructive and productive path.   There is no greater satisfaction than knowing you played a part in helping that goal come to pass.  Youth, even troubled teens, need to be responsible and accountable for their actions, as do we all.  If there is no change in their patterns of thinking and behaving, no accountability for their actions, they will continue in a vicious cycle, which may include crime and confinement.  So the question becomes, how do they make this change?  The solution lies in the word “choice.”  They must want to change.  But how can the desire to change be birthed and encouraged to grow in a youth who, for most of his life, has been entrenched in negative thinking and corrupt life styles?  The answer is in encouraging them to know, understand and believe that their life does have value and worth.  Once they know that, they can realize that they are selling themselves short by continuing in the patterns they have been living in which are causing them to be “troubled.”  Helping youth to know and understand being accountable for their actions, while recognizing their value and worth as human beings, is the goal of this program.  This opens up the door of HOPE for their futures, and what greater goal can there be than that? 

Course Certification:

Certification as a Youth Behavioral Advisor is available through Therapon Institute, Marrero, Louisiana. The course is available in-house or through distance-ed. Twenty CEUs will be given upon its completion. Click here for details.

Or, you can schedule seminars for your group in your area. Click here for information.