Some years ago I was counseling a teenager who had been
raised from infancy by his grandparents. The boy’s father had been killed in an
automobile accident, and subsequently his mother disappeared. The grandparents
had been doing all they could for him at great expense to themselves. It is
difficult for anyone to raise a teenager, and people in their 60s and
70s ought not to have to go through it a second time around.
For several years he rewarded them with unfathomable
rebellion, anger and sin until he made his grandparents miserable. I told him,
“They did not have to take you in. You could have gone to an orphanage. You
could have been a ward of the court. They got up with you in the middle of the
night. They changed your diapers and fed you and clothed you. They raised you
at great sacrifice to themselves. Nobody would have blamed them if they had
said, “We just can’t handle it at our age.”
He replied bitterly, “Do you think this is the first time
I’ve ever thought of all that? I know what they’ve done. What am I supposed to
do, spend the rest of my life saying ‘thank you’?”