I am going through a phase. I listen to church sermons. I will take a radio broadcast of any sermon, any time. Today I was in my car when I tuned in to one station. The pastor was talking about getting married before you start a serious relationship. He was talking about how teens so badly want to be adults. How in highschool, they seek acceptance, especially if it is someone of the opposite sex. It reminded me of me ten years ago. I decided to jot some thoughts about that age down (but not while driving.) They are as follows:
I wanted to be accepted by a boy. This had not been a real priority in my life before. I first noticed the desire four years ago when I was 10. That was when my hormones started changing my mind and body, and school was not just math and spelling anymore. School was about cute boys. Middle school came after, and it was a time of suffering. All that dressing out in gym class! All the bodily embarassment! Or as the pastor on the radio station said, "I am worried! I have zits on my face! My parents don't have as much money as other peoples' parents! I'm not popular!" If fifth grade was when puberty began, and highschool was when kids started letting hormones dictate their choices, middle school was the middle ground. It was a tender time when teachers tried to root me and my schoolmates to education. I was a freshman in highschool now. Where had my mind been floating for the past three years? It was as if that time of learning and growing and their meaning had been lost on me. It was as if the need for male attention had lain dormant inside me for all that time. Now I cared and cared enough to make it my goal and focus. Over math and spelling. Seriously. I could have a boyfriend or study. I preferred the former. Even when my boyfriend and I tried studying together. One day we were doing English homework together. We were reciting lines from Romeo and Juliet. I had trouble focusing. I wanted him to look at me and give me attention. I look on this with clarity and see how badly I didn't in my heart desire a boyfriend at the time, and how badly I did desire to study English! Not that I had ever been the smartest person in the school. Math would be hard no matter what, but I usually chose not to focus my efforts on homework. It was as if I was on a highway, getting off at an exit and on its bridge to turn around and drive back in the direction I had just come from. I must have liked this idea of fitting in, like the pastor on the radio said. Likewise, the young man I liked must have liked the idea of validating me. While many other highschool couples' relationship was about sex, mine was an eager attempt to be noticed and recognized, to be chosen, to be accepted by athletes and cheerleaders and rich kids, and probably an outlet from lonliness. I think I placed more responsibility on this boy than any of the other kids were placing on eachother. Maybe theirs was superficial, but I believed mine was blessed. Where did I think I was going? I felt God wanted me to be happy and was therefore giving me an opportunity to "date." At age 14. Two and three years before I listened to my friend, Molly Queen, say the exact same things to me. I would pity her for thinking that God wanted all the same things she did. As if God were that small. But here I was at 14 honestly believing it myself. And believing with false joy, as if a boy were the answer to problems. As if a relationship was the curiously light cross I was handed to bear. As if I were that special. I thought that I was the first girl to believe that God loved me because he had slipped me a boy."
I say if you are 14 and find yourself believing that the Creator of the Universe has asked you to please date (and another kid with parents who care just as much as yours, at that) then think in the opposite direction. If you are in highschool, you are without any doubt in my mind, a CHILD. So be a child.
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