Fireside Stories for Girls in Their Teens

Excerpt

FOREWORD

“Given a Camp-fire, a group of friendly girls and a good story-teller who knows and loves the girls, and the ideals of a whole community may be lifted in a night.”

The teen age girl is a great problem and at the same time a great opportunity. Her ideals seem low, yet there is no time in her life when she will more gladly follow a great ideal. She seems fickle, yet she is putting her friends to a test that is most worth while. She is misunderstood and she can not understand herself. She is searching for something, yet she does not know what it is.

Her problems are many, and most of them she must solve alone. If she follows the crowd and goes in the way of least resistance, there is a big chance that she will fall by the way. If she does not follow the crowd, it is because somewhere, some time, she has found a compelling ideal and is following it. Sometimes that ideal comes to her in the form of a friend. Sometimes she is fortunate enough to have found that ideal in her mother. But often and often it comes to her through a little story that lives with her, and works for her, and helps her to hold to the best, in spite of the manifold temptations to do otherwise.

Recently I met a young woman whom I had seen only once and that was twelve years ago. She came to me after a service and said, “Will you tell Van Dyke’s ‘Lump of Clay’ to-night? Twelve years ago I heard you tell it. I was so discouraged at the time, for everything seemed going wrong and life seemed so useless. But I dropped into a church and heard you tell the story. You have no idea what it has done for me. I am teaching in the college near by and I should like to have my girls hear the story. Perhaps they need it as I did.”

Many of the workers with girls have seen this need and have wanted to meet it and yet have been unable to find the story that was needed by the girl. It is because of this very need in my own work that I am sending out these stories, most of which I have told over and over to my girls. Many of them have been written because of special problems that needed to be met—problems peculiar to adolescence—problems found in every class and club of girls the country over.

The stories are not to amuse, for we have no time to amuse girls in the story hour. We have little enough time, at the best, for implanting ideals and every story hour should leave a vital message. That is the thing the girls want and why should we give them less.

The stories are not to be read. They need the personal touch, the sympathetic voice, the freedom of eye that tells the story-teller which girls are finding the message of the story. Some of them will hurt—but experience has shown me that these are the very ones that one has to tell over and over. Can you imagine the Master reading to the groups gathered about him the stories that you and I love to read in his word? When you go into the heart life of a girl, let all your personality help you to carry the message. It was the Master’s way of story-telling....