My senior year of high school, a teacher asked me this question: “If your house was on fire and you could only save three things from that house, what would you take?”

At seventeen, my answers were very self-centered. I would save my guitar, my swimming trophies and a ring my girlfriend had given me. My choices showed my immaturity.

Only a few years after that teacher asked me the question, my home in Oklahoma was leveled by a tornado. I lost that guitar and those swimming trophies. The catastrophe certainly shook me out of my self-centered stupor.

I wonder what your teen would say if you asked him the same question: What’s most important to you?

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