What are milestones?

(Today’s Post is an excerpt borrowed from a Fuller Youth Institute‘s Blog Post, “Leveraging Milestones: Making Spiritual Conversations Normal at Home” by Steve Dang.) 

A milestone in travel historically referred to a literal stone marking the distance along a road. In our culture today, the language of milestones is used in a variety of ways, from fitness to project management to child development. We think of them as goals or markers along the way toward a destination.

We often create milestones as we move towards something or somewhere. For example, I know the In-n-Out in Kettleman City on my drive from the Bay Area to Disneyland marks the halfway point in my journey. Milestones act as a reference point for the distance traveled and the remaining journey, but also create a sense of intentionality and meaning-making. In various cultures, rites of passage are synonymous with or act as milestones in and of themselves. Rites of passage typically line up with natural stages of life such as birth, puberty, marriage, and death.

We often see these rites in the transition between childhood and adolescence. In Jewish culture, the bar/bat mitzvah happens at the age of 13, the time when boys and girls begin to bear personal responsibility for living out Jewish law and tradition. While the bar mitzvah lines up with a transition from childhood to adolescence, it also calls out a shift in responsibility and purpose. Rites of passage are often established to help a person or age cohort navigate the confusing and ambiguous space between one stage of life to another. Having a clear marker of milestones creates intentionality and purpose across the transition. Knowing a milestone is approaching, some communities will gather around young people to help them prepare for life ahead.

Whether rites of passage or milestones, church communities have unique opportunities to intersect families at these various points and equip them to normalize spiritual conversations within their home life. Our encouragement to parents is to shift the pressure off the view that “spiritual conversation” is confined to opening the book of Leviticus on the dinner table every night for a family Bible study, but simply means integrating spirituality into everyday life and experiences. Our desire is for spiritual conversations in the family ecofriendly-minivan to be as normal as the conversations about basketball or the latest Disney hit.

I hope you enjoy this reading. Follow the URLs above to read and learn more!

Blessings,
Tracy