Last Sunday Northside Church honored our high school graduates. I dressed like the Mayhem character in the Allstate Insurance commercials. We also produced a series of videos featuring the youth staff. Here’s some of the advice I shared with the seniors.

NO PRESSURE, but the decisions you make in the next few years will determine the entire direction of your life. So, choose wisely. But again, no pressure!

In the coming years, you will make important choices about school, friends, alcohol, drugs, dating, sex, marriage, vocation, faith, and more. While your parents, family, church,

At the risk of sounding like a preacher, I would like to offer you some advice today. This is not the type of advice you will find in the gold covered book with tassels that your great-aunt thought would be a perfect graduation gift for a teenager living in the 1950s!

I warn you that experience is a tough teacher. She gives the test first, and then teaches the lesson! Wisdom learns from others poor choices so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes yourself. These lessons are hard won, practical, and down to earth wisdom.

• Study, then play.
• The 1^st semester is critical to your college success.
• Separate your laundry into whites, lights, and darks.
• Choose your friends wisely.
• If you don’t get into a particular fraternity or sorority, it is not the end of the world.
• People are unimpressed with much you can drink. If they are, you need a better set of friends. Alcoholism and drug abuse begin in high school and college.  
• If you are sexually active, then you are sleeping with every person that person has ever slept with, and medicine cannot always treat the body or the soul.
• Learn to be comfortable alone—everyone is occasionally.
• The most interesting people are not like anyone else—resist peer pressure.
• Tear up credit card applications—it is NOT free money.
• Expect potholes and detours—they are NOT the end of the road.
• Wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident—and on general principle.
• If you have siblings, your brothers and sisters are the only ones who know what it was like to grow up in your home. Be kind to them—you may need a kidney donor someday!
• Call your mama. And your daddy, and not just when you need money!