Teenage Epiphanies: Nuggets of Wisdom from a Group of 16-year-old Girls (Part 1)

       

The journal. 

       We all have memories of our teen years.  Each of us experienced at least one period of time in our high school careers during which we forged amazing, life-changing friendships, and learned life lessons that we still carry with us today.  My life is no different.  When I turned sixteen, I started attending a youth group that changed the course of the rest of my life.  In this group, I made some amazing friendships--one of which, happens to be my husband.
        Though my memory fails to preserve all of the details, I recall spending countless hours with a select group of young women.  We went on silly adventures together, prayed for one another and basically turned our entire summer into one giant sleepover.  Our conversations usually revolved around Jesus: what he had done in our lives, what he was doing, and what we hoped he would do.  These conversations often brought forth quite a few metaphors and--what we thought were hilarious-- illustrations of how God dealt with things.  The following are some of those tiny little epiphanies. (Keep in mind, these were handwritten by a sixteen-year-old me who had just experienced her first heartbreak.  All of us were going through very teenaged things.)

1. "Loved ones are like breathing.  You draw a breath in slowly, and you keep it in until you can't hold it anymore, and it violently escapes you.  But if you let it out gently, it will return to you."

2. "When you're playing slow-pitch softball and you are pitching, if you fix your eyes on the catchers glove and don't take your eyes off it, and you try your best to concentrate and let your arm do what it has to do, then you will get a strike.  But if you've got your eyes on the umpire or the batter, no matter how hard you try to make your arm work, you'll be far from getting a strike.  This principle applies to the Christian faith in a big way."

3. "Hard times in life can be compared to a scary ride at an amusement park.  At first you don't really want to ride it, but you get in linie and tough it out.  While you're on it, you hate every minute of it, but afterwards, you feel great that you can say that you had the courage to ride it.  Whether or not you'll make the same mistake and ride again, that's another situation."

4. "My hope is like a trick candle.  No matter how hard I try to put it out, it always keeps burning."

5. "Our problems are like broken toys.  When we were little and our toys were broken, we'd give them to our parents to fix them because we weren't strong enough.  But it would take them a while to fix it so we would take it back and try to fix it on our own, with little success and often just further damaging the situation.  Give it to God and in his time it will be fixed."

**6. "Peeing is like the joy of God.  When you have to pee, you have to get it out, and the toilet is like the world.  And the plunger is like the Bible because you have to get the crap out of the world." - Vanessa Adams

To be continued...