I could see her sitting in her bare, hopeless little room, with the memory of the sunshine, the new suit and the jonquil, the solo, and the Risen Lord filling her soul as she made her sacrifice, letting the cherished plan of singing lessons go.
“What made you want to do it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I felt that I ought to, and Easter makes you think of those things. I think Christians ought to be more like Christ, as Dr. —— said in his sermon.”
That was the explanation. She was following, the best she knew how, the pathway of the Christ—her ideal. God bless her,—the sacrifice will pay.
Failing to find the Christ, the religious sense satisfies itself with lower ideals. Intensified longings, dissatisfaction, and a restlessness not found in the girl who truly gives her allegiance to the Christ and feels his steadying power, are very evident in the girl who has not yet found the one whom she can call Master and Lord.
Keeping pace with the deepening and broadening of the religious sense and the physical growth and development, the intellectual powers have been busy grasping new truths, eagerly seizing new facts that relate to life, comparing, rejecting, reasoning, indeed for the first time independently thinking.
Before her friends realize it, the years have hurried past and the time has come when only one more “teen” remains. She is eighteen. Eighteen may find her plunged into life as a wage-earner, one of the procession of thousands of girls facing realities that are hard. It may find her already in the whirl of social life, struggling to meet its demands, or in college facing its problems. Wherever it finds her, two things are true of her. She thinks for herself,—and she is critical.
Many of the theories of life and religion which she accepted unquestioningly she questions now. Doubts assail her, and she is perplexed by the evidence of wrong and evil resulting not only from weakness, but from deliberate planning. If all her ideals fail her, if the men and women she has trusted disappoint her, she grows cynical, and tells you that “no one is what he seems.”
Now, more than at any time in her life, she needs to meet fine men and women, that they may overbalance those whom she thinks have failed. She needs to know definitely the good being done everywhere in the world, to study great sociological movements, to see the efforts being made to meet the special needs of the day, the problems of the cities, and the salvation of the individual. Biography is good for her, and sketches of real men and women living and working for and with their fellows strengthen her faith and steady her.
Now is the time when she so easily develops into a gossip, and she needs anything and everything that will help her despise it, and provide her with something to talk about beside her neighbors and associates.