Taking Advice

When starting this job of caring for and teaching teenage girls, I never dreamed that it would affect me so much as a person. The seemingly trite comment that I've heard over and over in sunday school of "I learned so much more for myself than for anyone else in preparing this lesson." has taken on new meaning for me. In some ways, it was like my experience learning a foreign language.
When I started to learn Norwegian, I started with learning vocabulary words, and memorizing sentences, but as I progressed I learned more and more of the subtle rules of syntax and grammar. The more I learned, the more I had to reexamine English to understand why we phrase things the way we do. You never really think about in your native language, because to you that's just how you would say it correctly. Norwegians were so good at speaking English, that sometimes they would ask a complex grammatical question. All I could say sometimes was what the correct phrasing would be, but I would have to think and think for a while about why it was right.
I find the same thing happening with frightening regularity in my work with the girls, as I teach them about not dating while they are young, the value of honesty and hard work, the pitfalls of pleasure now and pay later. Just as explaining the subtleties of English can be difficult without the knowledge of why it's supposed to be said a certain way, it's frustrating to explain the how and why of morality when the supporting structure of my faith has to be stripped away. I have to teach pure ethics, and use logic and reason to prove the things that I know in my heart are true. It has really reinforced my testimony about how God gives us commandments not to restrict us, but to show us how to be happy and feel good about ourselves. Showing that these commandments and social obligations we call morality are intrinsically worthwhile has really helped me to reexamine myself.
It also occurs with punctuality that I catch myself giving the girls advice about what I really need to hear at the moment. Just the other day I was giving the counsel that we always need to keep ourselves open to learning new things and changing the preconceptions we hold about things and people. I was referring to her refusing to admit that she might ever think that the goth lifestyle wasn't fulfilling or cool, but later that evening I refused to watch a movie because I thought it was going to be liberal propaganda. It struck me that I was closing off opportunities for me to grow by closing my mind to it before seeing it. I watched it objectively, and I learned that I really enjoyed watching the movie and thinking about perspectives I had never considered before.
Most of all, this job really makes me want to really get to know Katie, my youngest sister. I've watched her grow and become such an interesting person to read about while she learns in Jerusalem and I can't wait for her to get home and have her come hang out with us more. Most of all, I just want to listen to her, because I feel I've talked so much to her, rather than with her. I can't wait.