Maturity 1 - Childish or Mature? ...

Monday, Sept 28, 2009. If I ask my children: do you want to become adults, then they react immediately with a strong “No”. They do not want to grow up. Being grown up, being an adult, being mature is boring for them. They want to play. They want to jump and run. They want to behave like children. They are not thinking about maturity.

On the other hand, when I go through the many meetings and interactions of a normal work day, I observe a lot of childish behaviour. Instead of working together and supporting each other, colleagues as well as the leaders of groups or work units keep information from each other. They search their own advantage. They speak about other people in a way which can only be called “immature” and “unbalanced”. They get angry about little things. Sometimes you think that our institutions are a big kindergarten

It can be so liberating to work with colleagues who are really mature. It can be truly wonderful, to be together with mature people, either at home or at work. Mature people know how to judge a situation. They know where problems might come from. They have understanding of the people around them, they find balanced words which open up a future for everyone. Mature people can be a real joy for my heart and my mind.

Maturity is an important topic for faith and for our community as a whole. It is addressed many times in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. In his 1st letter to the church in Corinth the apostle Paul wrote: “Do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature.” (1. Cor 14: 20) Paul and Jesus want mature Christians. They want us to become mature in everything we do.

Maturity is not this boring adulthood which my children do not like. Maturity is a state of being which is surpassing the childish behavioural patterns. Maturity is liberating, inspiring and joyful. Maturity can be an ideal environment for developing creativity, for being innovative. Maturity can be flexible and unconventional. Maturity will take care of different characters, of different personal background, of different goals and targets. Maturity lives in freedom and generates freedom for people.

Maturity has experience. Maturity knows reaction patterns and has already experienced the pain and difficulties of various situations. With this maturity can show compassion with people who are in a difficult environment. Maturity as the bible understands it takes from the maturity of God himself, from the maturity of the Holy Spirit. This maturity has the wisdom of many thousand years of experience, yet its grace is new every morning. It knows the pain of countless generations, yet it has the power and motivation to generate a new creation step by step every day. We will explore this maturity and its meaning further over the next days. [R.W.E.P., jesusnetwork.eu]

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