How To Not Be Shallow

“You are not too young to begin paying close attention to the world, to others, and to begin asking yourself, ‘What do joyous people have in common?’

You are not too young to pay attention to the words and deeds of your friends and ask what sort of adults they will become if they continue down their current paths.

You are not too young to pay attention to the pious adults in your life and ask how they got there, how they became pious.

And neither are you too young to look at miserable adults and ask how they became miserable.

As an adult who is nearly 40 years old, and as an adult who has been teaching high school for sixteen years, I will say that very few of the miserable adults I know became miserable because their grades in school weren’t good enough. Rather, most of the adults I know who are miserable, whether they are “saved” in the common evangelical sense of the word, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Catholic, or Orthodox, are miserable because they never learned profundity of spirit. In short, they are miserable because they are shallow.”

-from a lecture I am giving to Orthodox youth this weekend at The Saint Emmelia Orthodox Christian Homeschooling Conference