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 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 “Thetrivialround,thecommontask 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.
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