The girl in her teens, although she is able now and then through her
imagination to transfer herself to a land of day-dreams, where all she
desires is hers, for the most part is obliged to live in the everyday,
and often she finds it hard.
But she is young--and one may always hope when in her teens. If she is
ill, health may come in a few weeks, a month, a year at most. If she
works hard, she may always hope for a "better place with more money,"
or by and by, just in the future a little way, a happy home of her own
where she will have everything she wants.
If she is struggling for an education, the joy of what she will be
able to do some day sustains her. If she is a care-free girl with no
burdens, one whose parents give her every advantage and strive to make
her girlhood happy, life is one great joy and the future an even more
wonderful dream.
But these girls, every one of them is obliged to live in the ordinary
world, and we who realize it must so train them that when they meet it
in reality they will be able to live happily.
One reason why there is so much misery and unhappiness in home life
to-day is because the girl in her teens is not trained to live. Even
those who love her most say, "Oh, she's young yet, there's time
enough." Meantime habits are formed and when the "time" comes
effective training is not possible. In spite of hopes, castles,
day-dreams, most girls are destined to live amid the commonplaces of
life, and unless we prepare them, many will fail to learn that
"The trivial round, the common task
Will furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God,"
and so insure our happiness.
The Sunday-school is limited of course in what it can do to guide the
girl in the everyday, so many other agencies enter into her training,
and yet we have seen that what we teach on Sunday must influence her
on Wednesday as she settles some question, or we have not really
helped her.
As we try to plan how we may best help her to live, we ourselves meet
the question, "What, after all, do we want her to be in this world of
the everyday?"
It is a little hard to answer, we want so much for her, and yet it can
all be summed up in one sentence, "We want her to be comfortable to
live with."
When we stop to think of what a flood of blessing would come to this
old world if all the girls now in their teens were comfortable to live
with, and will be as they develop into full womanhood, we know no
effort should be spared to make them so.
If the girl in her teens is comfortable to live with she will be
content in the place where she is. She will have that sane
satisfaction which is not apathy but which makes the best of what it
has till something better can be found.
Very early in her teens the girl begins to pencil upon her face the
first tiny lines which in later years, grown deep and heavy, will mark
her discontent. There are so few faces that show their owners have
learned to be content.
A sixteen-year-old girl friend of mine the other day said in a
discouraged way, "Well, I wish Frances' mother felt differently about
their home. Her mother is such a lovely cook, and their house is neat
and pretty, too, but she will never let Frances have any of the girls
to dinner because they haven't a maid. She wouldn't let even _me_ go
upstairs to Frances' room, and I know it must be so pretty by the way
she describes it. It is too bad; we just love her, and we could have
such good times. She can't accept our invitations very often because
her mother won't let her entertain us. It is just too bad."
The girl was right. It was "too bad" to deprive Frances of the society
of these girls, who, though they came from homes where more money was
expended, would have so enjoyed her simple hospitality.
Although not meaning to do it, her mother is teaching Frances to place
wrong values upon things, and her life will be narrowed and made more
and more unhappy because the living-room is small, and the floor not
of hard wood, but painted around the outside of the rug, and she will
come to believe that happiness consists of possessions. When she
marries, like thousands of other girls she will be unhappy unless her
own new home is perfect in equipment from the start, she will want the
new, "up-to-date" things faster than her husband's salary can supply
them, and the long line of misery that follows may easily be hers.
If, instead, her mother could demonstrate that a neat, clean, and
therefore attractive home is a fit place in which to entertain any
friend by welcoming her daughter's friends for a good time, how
quickly for that girl things would assume their right places in the
scale of importance. We can help her to be happy and content by
showing her in what very simple ways good times may be had.
If the girl in her teens grown to womanhood is to be comfortable to
live with she must be trained to be kind. Kindness is born in
unselfishness, and if we expect her to be unselfish, the days of her
teens must be her training days. She must be carefully guarded from
daily association with women who speak cynically of life, and shielded
from close contact with those whose conversation is invariably the
criticism of their neighbors. She must be led to let her heart
speak--the heart is rarely unjust and seldom unkind. Her thoughts must
be continually turned, as were those of Frances Willard and Alice
Freeman Palmer, toward her neighbors in need, until a world-sympathy
is born in her, and the joy of helping makes her keen to help. The
girl to whose lips almost involuntarily spring the words "Let me help
you" will not find it so easy to utter the cutting word or the phrase
that leaves a sting. A real interest in "the other girl" will tend to
make her unselfish.
If she is comfortable to live with she must be thoughtful.
Thoughtfulness also has its birth in unselfishness. The girl wrapped
up in thoughts of herself has little time to be concerned with others,
and demands invariably that she be the center of the circle. She does
not make others comfortable and is not good to live with.
The girl who is good to live with in the world of the everyday, shares
her joys and pleasures with the family. How many times I have seen a
tired mother forget her cares listening to the recital of her
daughter's "good times"! Her petty little annoyances, her
disappointments, she keeps to herself.
After all, when we sum up the qualities of the girl in her teens which
endear her to every one, and make her good to live with, we can put
them under the one word unselfish. If she is this, then she will apply
herself to her studies; she will remember her mother's burdens and not
add to them; she will think of all she owes to her father and show her
gratitude to him; she will be a helpful friend to the boys and girls
with whom she associates, and she will have a good time, as the
unselfish girl invariably does. By frequent illustrations taken from
life, the Sunday-school teacher may hope to make her see how true
these things are. An absolutely unselfish girl may be, as those in
their teens say she is, "impossible," but the impossible can be made
wonderfully attractive by the teacher who can picture the girl in her
teens at her best.
In her life in the everyday, no matter what her circumstances may be,
the girl is constantly tempted to live below her best. The temptation
to be disagreeable about the household tasks that fall to her, to
forget the errand she is asked to do, to be careless about her room,
to leave things for her mother to look after and put away, to be
impatient with younger brothers and sisters--all these things are so
easy. Not to yield to them requires constant watchfulness and
struggle, and the word of warning on the part of the teacher, through
story and illustration each Sunday, helps the girl see these faults in
all their miserable littleness.
In her school life she meets the temptation to neglect her studies,
and to spend too much time on the social side. Many girls are tempted
to yield to petty deceptions; some are tempted to copy or exchange
work; many are discourteous, and many more do nothing to make school
life happy for any except those in their own "set." Some whose parents
are so unwise as to leave them without knowledge or protection fall
into temptations from which they never escape.
The high-school girl needs from the earnest lips of a woman she
admires the weekly word of warning, and the oft-repeated plea to keep
herself pure and fine.
If the girl in her teens is in business she meets daily the temptation
to let her own interests interfere with her employer's, to waste time,
to give excuses, to indulge in pleasures that do not uplift, but mean
late hours, little sleep, and physical unfitness for work. She needs
every Sunday the practical words of warning and inspiration straight
from the heart of a woman who understands her temptations and can help
her to overcome them.
Wherever the girl in her teens finds herself she needs some one to
make her want to be her best amidst all the things which tend to pull
her down. She needs strong words that will show her to herself in all
her weakness making her ashamed if she has yielded, and at the same
time arousing in her the determination not to yield again.
When the teacher understands the girl in her teens and lives close
enough to her to become her confidante, she knows how hard the fight
to be good and fine and strong in the everyday is, and she realizes
more and more as her experience broadens that while the girl's love
for her parents is a great incentive toward right living, and desire
to please those whom she greatly admires is a help, and while
unhappiness and other consequences of evil-doing act as deterring
agents, yet no one of these things, nor all of them together, will
prove strong enough to keep her pure and honest and make her
unselfish.
What will? Nothing will make her absolutely perfect. Only one thing,
so far as I know, will keep her safe and strong in the life of the
everyday. That thing is the consciousness that she lives in the
presence of God, accepting Jesus Christ as her example and her
_Helper_ in her effort to live aright.
A girl conscious that she lives out each day under the pure, kind eye
of an infinite personality, interested in her efforts toward
righteousness, and that she need not be afraid to ask for strength or
for pardon, finds it easier to do right and harder to do wrong than
the other girl who leaves him out of the struggle.
In all the hundreds of girls and women I have met, the most
thoughtful, generous and unselfish, the purest in heart and mind,
those richest in the finer traits of humanity, have been conscious of
the presence of God in the world of the everyday.
They live as in the presence of a perfect father, and live aright, not
because men see, but because he sees, and they are able to live as
they do because they ask for help and receive it. If we are to be of
real help to the girl in her teens, this consciousness of the
_reality_ of God we must give to her.
I have so often seen it help in the lives of individual girls. I am
thinking now of Vivian, whose parents had given her up in despair. She
was careless, rude, and untruthful. In school her teachers considered
her "a bad girl." The Sunday-school teacher who took her class when
she was fifteen was one to whom the Christ was very real. She talked
about him reverently, as if he were a real friend and a great help in
everyday life. She interested Vivian. At Christmas she gave her
Hoffman's "Christ." Vivian put it on her bureau, dusted the picture
every day, and thought about it often. The teacher loaned her books of
the sort which made Christ seem a real friend. She began to think of
him as such and to pray that he would help her overcome the things
that everybody despised. She read "What would Jesus do?" several
times. She began to feel that God saw and cared, and as she worded it,
"I felt that in all these hard things Christ would help me, and I
asked him many times every day to make me do as he would."
Her room showed that something had come to Vivian. A quietness came
into her conversation. She treated her mother with a gentleness that
was so different that her mother cried when she told the teacher about
it. The girls saw the difference. Twice when she had been untruthful
she went to her teachers and confessed it. She made a desperate
struggle to speak accurately. Her father called her a changed girl,
and his face showed his joy over the change. She is to-day one of the
sweetest, strongest young women I know, prominent in her college and
trusted and loved by scores of girls.
She is one of many whose lives I have seen changed, and as the years
pass, and I see the power of the Christ still working miracles in
girls' lives, I long for more teachers like that one who opened
Vivian's eyes.
The greatest thing which the teacher can do for the girl in her teens
is to open her eyes to a real Christ, for then all the incentives for
pure, unselfish _living_ in the commonplaces of life's "everyday" will
be hers.