what a girl needs.

 {photo by lindsey vinson}

Girls with eating disorders.

Girls without daddies.

Girls who are depressed, hurting, and broken.

Girls without mommies.

Girls with abusive boyfriends, immature boyfriends, or no boyfriends at all.

Girls with unique purposes, passions, and gifts.

Girls without direction, guidance, or help.

Every beat of my heart belongs to these.

Because in some way or another, I have been one. Or I have known one.

I have been lost and confused, struggling to find my purpose.

My best friends have cut themselves. Starved themselves. Hated themselves.

I have watched them lose their way, and then rejoiced with them when they found it.

Now, I watch quietly as another, younger group of girls grows up, and I wonder: Who will help them?

This act of growing up cannot be done alone.

Girls need girls.

The most competent, loving, generous men on the planet could not begin to understand why a girl’s heart breaks when her boyfriend stops saying I love you, why she thinks it’s her fault when the phone no longer rings. They can’t understand what it means when our face fills with acne and somebody calls us ugly and every time we look in the mirror, that’s all we see.

They can’t understand slumber parties or late night giggle fests or the amount of food we’re all really capable of eating.

They don’t understand makeup or dressing for your body type or why Tom will always be perfectly suited for Meg.

They can’t fully understand our passions or our frustrations, our whims and our desires.

Mostly, though, they will never understand the unique God-given role we have been given as women.

In Christ’s body, in His church, girls need girls.

This isn’t radical. This is truth.

“Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live… to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.”

So Paul writes to Titus, many moons ago, far removed from the confused culture we today inhabit.

But the truth of his words — of The Word — remain.

Let the older teach the younger.

At 25, I am caught in between, and I am glad.

I am younger, eager to sit at the feet of the women who I have seen do it better: who love Christ, love their husbands, love the church, and do so in a way I cannot yet comprehend.

But now, as I climb into adulthood full throttle, I am also older, capable of speaking the truth in love to girls who are living what I have lived, experiencing what I have experienced.

And I remember! I remember my 12, 16, 18 year old self and I want to tell them what I would have told me: To be kind to those who don’t look like you. To love the girl in the mirror. To not be afraid of your passions, but to pursue them. To accept the truth that is God and His Son because that is the one thing in this life that won’t ever change. To delve into a deep, meaningful relationship with Him, because He deserves nothing less.

I’m not always given the opportunity to say those things, and I have never much liked being silent. It is tearing at me inside, I think, as I watch these girls muddle through to adulthood, in desperate need of someone older. And yes, someone female.

Over and over again the Scriptures tell us about being eyes, feet, arms, legs. We are the body, but what happens when the clothes are too tight, and the arm can’t do what it’s supposed to do?

If the arms are bound up in a straitjacket, can they still love? Can they still teach? Can they still hold the hands of those who are coming up behind them?

The answer, I think, is yes. In small ways and in quiet ways, I suppose, until someone finally decides to listen, to loosen the ties that bind, to acknowledge: Girls need girls. In the world. And in the church.

Girls need to see women who are passionately in love with their Lord. They need to be taught by women who are unique and quirky and confident, women who work behind the scenes and who lead by the Spirit. They need to know that we’re not all cut from the same pink polka dot fabric: That we are eyes, feet, arms, and legs, and that we each make up the beauty that is Christ’s body.

Girls need girls. The younger need the older.

The question is, are we -- as women who begin to find ourselves in that latter category -- ready to do something about it?