Ok so in my previous post I said I’d blog about the topic ‘growing up’ and I’m going to …NOW. So at the end of last yr I got two prophecies both on the same topic of growing up. The first one was ‘grow up’ and the second was ’stop mucking around’. Both within the span of approx one month. So I thought I’d better listen and start doing something about it. I took big chunks of time thinking through how I could grow up and become mature like the leaders that I look up to. I looked at all the people who influenced me and those I looked up to analysising how they did thing, what they did, how they responded etc. trying to find out what a mature person would do. I also looked at what I did do that i needed to grow up from. This helped heaps in the question of what a matured person would do cos I’d just look at what I did and just do the opposite. After all this I thought I had the perfect formula of maturity and how to achieve it, how long it would take and what it would look like.
Then came that day when God (as He usually does) messes with everything we have been trying to do. He gave me this thought “Will you ever become ‘mature’?” It was a little wierd cos everything I was thinking/analysising for the past few months was to become mature. During a shower think this is what I believe God really was trying to tell me. Maturity can never be reached.
Maturity is a concept that is only valid when its compared to something else. Everytime you reach a point where we think we are mature its only because we can look back at how immature we were. So 2 or 3yrs down the track we will look back on this time now and think again how immature we were. Also if we think we are mature we can always find someone else who is more mature making us immature. So in the end of the day if we ever think we are mature we really are immature for thinking we are mature… think about it. The thing we shouldn’t be trying to acheive isn’t maturity but growth. The fact that people call themselves/others mature/immature is measured by the amount of growth that they have acheived over a certain period of time with respect to a standard (for all you nerds this can be written as: ΔG/t wrt k [where G is growth, t is time and k is a constant]). Therefore we need to define the standard. There are two options someone of immaturity or someone of maturity and depending on this we define ourselves (as either mature or immature).
So here comes the most important question where have we set our standard? If we set it as a person who is more mature than ourselves then our level of growth will forever be capped by their level of maturity. If it is set at someone lower than ourselves we are also capped by their maturity because for us to be mature we only need to stay one step ahead of them. Then by these two statements there is nobody in the entire world we can pick that won’t cap our growth. BUT if we set God as our standard our growth can NEVER be capped.
When we set the standard so high we lift our game, we aim higher and even when we miss we still get so far and grow so much. Higher standards mean we train longer, push ourselves further and go the hard yards. So it comes back to this question again – Where have we set our standard? Furthermore - What are we doing to acheive it?
