Most of you girls are embarking on a monumental season in your life: the season of transition from beautiful girlhood to noble womanhood. This is also the season that brings new knowledge of good and evil. It brings a stronger awareness of our “crooked and perverse generation.”
As John Adams put it in a letter to his daughter Abigail when she was approaching her thirteenth birthday, it is “a time when the understanding opens, and the youth begin to look abroad into the world among whom they are to live.”
So begins a speech presented by the lovely example of visionary womanhood, Anna Sofia Botkin, on the occasion of a friend's thirteenth birthday. Believing that teens should be held to a standard of spiritual and behavioral excellence, and passionately agreeing with the vision she has of our society, I am linking to the article and recommending it to you.
I wish that when I turned 13, older girls (with whom a thirteen year old would be able to connect as a friend, and not as only a friend of my parents) had alerted me of the changes in outlook and emotions I would experience over the next several years. To be honest, my understanding of teenager came from The Brady Bunch and Saved by the Bell, and I just didn't feel like fitting that mold. To have been challenged to grow deeper in my relationship with God (which He accomplished by His grace anyway) and with my parents would have been a blessing.
God knows best, and He has used each circumstance in my life to form me into the maidservant He has today. Yet that experience, of feeling like a lonely pioneer to some extent, in the Christian teen world, has taught me to desire to share the vision with other young ladies. I pray if any young ladies read my blog, or any parents of such, that you would click on the link and read Anna Sofia Botkin's inspiring and gracious charge provided by Doug Phillips on his blog at Vision Forum.
As a disclaimer/comment, I didn't understand the part about Asia. Does anyone else?
To God be all glory.
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