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Maturity 2 - Important Things First? ...

Tuesday, Sept 29, 2009. One key feature of maturity is that mature people put important things first. They ban less important things to the second row.

To put important things first we need a mature understanding of what is important. We need to distinguish between urgency and importance. That is not always easy. In my days as a university teacher and scientist there are many urgent things coming in all the time. The average number of documents which you need to provide seems to grow every day. Quality control procedures take over, and we seem to spend more time on filling out “urgent” forms for quality control of research or supervision than doing the work. This is a typical example where the urgent things dominate the important things. Of course, it is more important to do research and develop something new than to fill out a document monitoring the progress. Without new developments, there would not be progress and the documents would just be part of an empty procedure. But we create our own urgency by counting the number of procedures, the number of hours or papers or citations, instead of moving into the content and dealing with the important things which are the basis for all the numbers and documents.

How does maturity deal with the above situation. Of course we need quality control. We need to monitor our progress. Of course we need tools to reflect where we go. This can be extremely helpful. So maturity will take into account all sides of the problem. A mature behaviour will find a balance between the needs. Here, there is the need to “search”. Research means to look at important questions and find out how to solve them. That means someone needs to spend his time on searching, on pulling together material and knowledge, on trying to find out new things, carrying out experiments or doing some theory. Something new will evolve here if he does this work. In the worst case the “new knowledge” will be how it does not work, since the scientist tried 100 different possibilities and they all failed. That is also progress in knowledge and should be published to tell it to others. In the lucky case he finds some method to solve the problem, this might be his experiment number 101. His work should be monitored, he should report it to the public who is paying him or her.

In faith there are many similar situations, where we need to put the important things first. It is important to get to know God. It is less important to follow particular rules. Faith is not primarily rules, but it is God's love, his justice and truth. Faith is about discovering a new world, God's world. Faith is about getting to know the eternal one. It is not about church buildings or church services. It is not primarily about ethics. Of course, people who believe will meet each other, and then we need to talk about the building or room we use for the meetings. But it is quite clear that this definitely not important. Questions of the order of a service are not important. But it is important to reflect God's love and God's truth in the way we do the services. When we know God, this will change our thinking, our feelings, our reasoning and our behaviour. In this sense ethics is very important. But without knowing God our ethics will be in an empty space. Without him they do not have the fundament which they require.

Where do you need to put the important things first? [R.W.E.P., jesusnetwork.eu]

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