On Aug. 13, one teenage girl’s album surpassed another teenage girl’s album atop Ireland’s pop music charts. While that won’t register a blip in Reformed and Presbyterian news, these two teens have been breaking music records around the world, with songs that have been streamed once for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Their songs share their fears and ask life questions. While the older generations scarcely notice them, the younger generations are uniting their souls to them.

Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo each skyrocketed to fame at age 13. Eilish, a homeschooler, up-loaded a song to the internet with her brother, and in two weeks it had been downloaded several hundred thousand times. At 18 she became the youngest person, and the first woman, to win all four major Grammy awards. But she has also endured anxiety, depression, and Tourette syndrome.

Time magazine called Olivia Rodrigo “a digitally native celebrity who lives at the beating heart of youth culture, a pupil of the Taylor Swift school of self-disclosure and the ultimate Gen Z cypher.” She got her break on a Disney series that highlighted her singing talent and then produced her own very personal songs, “her path paved by the soul-baring vulnerability of her songwriting itself mul-tiplied by the frenetic pace of the TikTok generation,” said Time.

If someone tells me one more time

“Enjoy your youth,” I’m gonna cry

And I don’t stick up for myself

I’m anxious, and nothing can help

And I wish I’d done this before

And I wish people liked me more

Eilish echoes Rodrigo’s anxious introspection: “Tell the mirror what you know she’s heard before/ I don’t wanna be you, anymore.” One could posit that these young women don’t represent their age group at all—they are filthy rich, cutting-edge stylish, and wildly popular. Yet, the rank-and-file of their generation hear the lyrics and know that they have a lot more in common than not. In their heads and hearts, the things they’ve been told they could trust are precarious.

With this empathy established, such artists, with the worldviews and solutions they project, func-tion perhaps not as much like false preachers but lost teachers. They were granted a worldwide au-dience at an age when most of us were dealing with playground politics, and they—like any of us thrust into that situation—are not equal to the task.

To those younger than ourselves, do we come across more like the person who barks “Enjoy your youth” and walks away, or the person who sits and walks alongside others and admits struggles with the human condition and unreachable expectations. The longing for genuine, close relation-ships serves as an endorsement of the kind of Christian hospitality our writers have encouraged in this issue (p. 8, p. 10).