When I first heard that twin teenagers had written a book, Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations, I cringed, thinking it was going to be a Christian version of Jackass where nice little Christian boys and girls bungee jump from Notre Dame Cathedral and free climb the Wailing Wall. These were certainly hard things. Significant? Well, that’s a different matter.

As it turns out Brett and Alex Harris, the brothers come authors, are nothing like Knoxville’s merry pranksters. The twins prefer to keep their tasks G-rated and make sure that their final inventory will add up to more than a mass of hangovers, scars, and broken bones.

Risen Magazine: What’s the advantage of doing hard things? I mean, what fun is it to be reading a book while your friends are playing video games?
Alex Harris: It’s about a longer-term perspective. Doing hard things is about growth. It’s only when we stretch ourselves that we grow. If we’re just looking in this moment, especially in the teen years, it’s all about having fun.

Brett Harris: If you view responsibility as a weight, it makes sense not to pick it up in your teen years. If you view it as a muscle to be trained and strengthened by exercise, you’re cutting yourself short. You’re going to get to a point and not have the strength to lift the heavy object. You can’t really avoid doing hard things. Are we going to do hard things early, or wait? Are we going to change the tire when it looks flat or have the tire bust out on the freeway?

AH: It does not mean that we’re the fun police. But is your fun a break from doing hard things and what God called you to do, or is doing hard things just an interruption from your fun?

RM: It seems like youthful energy, which I think is the greatest source of energy in the world, is going up in smoke, sometimes literally. There seem to be two schools of thought. One: Let a kid do whatever they want. Two: Make them all into good little Republicans.
BH: We don’t fall into either of those groups. We’re challenging young people and their parents to get into the right kinds of trouble, the kind of trouble you get into when you decide to obey God, even when it’s going against the flow.


AH: Doing whatever you want is really a recent phenomenon. The word teenagers itself was first documented in Reader’s Digest in 1941. Since then, we have a whole culture centered around that word.

RM: Certainly expendable income had something to do with that.
BH: When young people went from producers to consumers, they had to be entertained and kept occupied. There was a lot of money that they controlled. The problem with some of the suit-and-tie good kids is that they’re known simply for not doing any bad stuff—they’re not sleeping around, they’re not doing drugs. What are they doing? You can be above average; you can be exceptional, simply for avoiding all of the typical teen stuff. We’re not calling them to keep their suit and tie clean, but to get dirty for the right things, doing hard things. That’s a whole different approach.

RM: What types of trouble have you guys have been in for doing right?
AH: We did a modesty survey, which sprung from a fifteen-year-old girl who wanted to get an opinion from Christian guys on the ways girls dress. It seemed a little awkward at first, so we decided to do it anonymously. We gave her the green light and within a week she had 365 different questions submitted from college and high school girls all around the country. We realized that we couldn’t post that many questions, so we had to craft an entire survey system. We had a nineteen-year-old man from Canada who programmed the whole thing from the ground up. We were hoping for at least a hundred guys, and our dream was that a thousand guys would take it. We had seventeen hundred in the first two weeks. We had to close it off cuz there was too much data to go through otherwise. The day it launched we received half a million hits. That was all buzz generated word of mouth, cuz we didn’t promote it.

BH: A lot of people took it wrongly, like guys were telling girls how to dress. What it really was were the guys asking girls for their input.

RM: So you haven’t been in any big trouble.
BH: Part of the reason for that is we’re two teen guys who are actually doing something. Because of low expectations, we can get away with quite a bit more than someone two years older. In a lot of ways we avoid it, but the criticism will definitely come. We’re hoping that as we take a stand and do what’s right, that that muscle will be built up. Obviously, it’s His grace that allows us to stand for Him, but part of that grace is that He gives us opportunity every day to do that and to strengthen that muscle, to see that He’s faithful. I think that down the road, especially as we get involved in politics more, that we’ll be criticized more. An example of that are martyrs who are killed for their faith. We were on a show the other day where the host was talking about a group of young people who had lived behind the iron curtain. They came and sang Christian hymns in front of the capitol building, and after being repeatedly told to stop, they were actually shot. It started revival in the country and contributed heavily to the curtain coming down. That would be the ultimate example of taking a stand. We talk about five different kinds of hard things. Taking a stand is the last one, the hardest one, and can include the ultimate sacrifice. We’re speaking at a conference this year called “The Purpose Driven Death.” It’s not calling you to die, but what does it mean for your death to have a purpose?

RM: How does a person know they’re an adult other than by birth date?
AH: We talk about that in our book. John Piper, a pastor from Minneapolis, calls it a holy ambition. He defines holy ambition as something you want to do that God wants you to do also. He says that the primary mark of a Christian passing from a child to an adult is getting a holy ambition. Once you have that, you’re a man or a woman, go pursue it.


BH: The message to the adults, who often have low expectations of a young person, is not to say, “That’s not possible; you can’t do it.” God puts a passion in a young person or chooses a young person: David, Mary the mother of Jesus, the prophet Jeremiah . . . You end up on the wrong side of history if you try to keep that from happening.


AH: Zach Hunter was twelve years old, and he thought, Man, if I lived back during th