Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

Jenkins frames adolescence as a fork in the road: rebellion or restless inquiry. It is an old evangelical anxiety rendered in plain, almost parental language, and that plainness is the point. By calling the believer a "real young person", he quietly rejects the idea of a frictionless, prepackaged faith. If you are authentic, he implies, puberty brings turbulence. The line dignifies that turbulence without letting it off the hook.

The most interesting move is the pairing of "rebel" against "search, doubt, and wonder". Rebellion is cast as a hard break, a refusal. The other path is a softer, more narratively useful arc: doubt isn’t apostasy; it’s a plot device. "Search" and "wonder" domesticate skepticism, turning it into a stage of spiritual development rather than a threat. Jenkins is a novelist, and you can hear the storyteller’s instinct: adolescence is where the character either exits the story or deepens.

Context matters. Jenkins writes popular Christian fiction (most famously tied to end-times storytelling) that thrives on converting abstract theology into relatable emotional beats. This sentence serves that same mission: it reassures religious parents and youth leaders that questioning is expected, even productive, as long as it stays within a Christian frame. The subtext is pastoral triage: keep the teen inside the community by legitimizing uncertainty, while still warning that rebellion is the alternative. It’s not a neutral observation. It’s a strategy for retention, packaged as empathy.