Accepting responsibility. Measured perspective. Ability to look at the big picture. Fully Developed. Accountability. Flexibility. Continued Growth.
Many words that were used when asked to define “maturity” among many people.
Maturity is one of those words that seem to always cause people to pause and scratch their heads for a moment when asked. And you will always have various opinions and ideas, depending on who you ask and where they are in their personal and professional life.
A 12-year-old middle school student will answer differently from a 19-year-old freshman in college. A platinum-selling rap artist will answer differently from the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. A single young adult will answer differently from a married individual with three children. Perspective is important.
But one thing that seems to be a common thread that links everyone together when defining maturity seems to be the idea that no one person ever reaches that level of maturity. Not saying that people never mature, but that a person should always be growing and evolving in life.
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” — I Corinthians 13:11
Now, that does not mean that as you grow up, you completely lose the love and joy of childhood (God knows that I will gladly stay in bed on Saturday mornings that I am free and watch Looney Toons while munching on cereal), but at certain stages in life, you don’t remain childish. At the age of 30, you should not still be throwing temper tantrums. At age 45, you should not be selfishly grabbing all the best toys and gadgets for yourself and leave your family in need.
Don’t take this the wrong way; I’m not bashing anybody. Who am I, after all, to say what it means to be a father or a husband when I’m still single and traveling the world? But, as I have looked over my life and even the life of my friends, I can see where maturity has been a major part of my life and the life of others.
At the end of the day, maturity is the actions that you choose.
Reading the verse above, I always assumed that when it talked about “becoming a man,” it meant when I hit the age of maturity according to the law. But, even at the age of 18, I realized that I wasn’t a man. In fact, I’ll dare say even at the age of 21, I still wasn’t a man. By age, by legal status, yes, I was, but my actions and the level of my maturity had not caught up just yet. As the old country saying goes, I was acting more like my shoe size than I was my age (I’m a size 13, if you were just dying to know).
And that can happen to anyone; our actions determine the level of maturity. When life throws us curve balls and we behave like we are three years old again, crying and fighting and pouting and fussing, it kills the notion of ourselves proclaiming maturity. I’ve seen it before when people have complete meltdowns and revert to their childhood behaviors instead of finding new, mature ways to face challenges…because they will come back to haunt us again.
If you have been following this blog previously, posts like these are not uncommon. But now, as I continue to grow and mature, I’m taking things to a new place. This blog will begin to take on a more mature approach with its topics. No longer will I randomly spew out my thoughts, jumbled like a jigsaw puzzle dumped out on the kitchen table, but I ‘ll do my best to articulate everything as clearly as I can.
To do that, along the way, I’ll have close friends assist by adding in some of their thoughts and inputs.
This blog today is dedicated to the foundation I hope to lay as we begin to look into what maturity means as young adults, as Christians, as people in general, and how it impacts various areas of our personal and professional lives.
Time to pack away those childish things…time to mature.
The Book of James 