Still Maturing? Yes!
Checking in with Cammy, who is on a four-day retreat with her covenant group of 30 years, I paused when I heard her say, “The work we do helps me in my maturity.” I thought that sounded so odd! Cammy is a 60-something, master's-educated, experienced pastor with broad experience as a youth minister, church planter, chaplain, district superintendent, and director of leadership development for an annual conference. I think of her as incredibly mature. Yet here she was, confessing that there is still room to grow in that maturity—and of course, she is right.
Our journey as Christians is one of lifelong sanctification, of growing more and more into the image of Christ, into the image of Love. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, insisted that we could even become “perfect in love” in this lifetime. That puts “maturity” into perspective.
We often hold a false notion that maturity is marked by a particular age or stage of life in which we have acquired enough education and experience to have attained maturity with the implication that there is little room for additional growth. How egotistical—and how limiting of the possibilities that God so clearly sees for us! “Come on, come on!” God calls to us. “You can do it. You can learn a new way of thinking, a new skill set, a new way of seeing the other person, and a new way of putting yourself in their shoes.”
If we are to mature—as individuals and as a society—we must always be listening for that voice, pushing ourselves beyond our supposed “maturity.” That is what Lent affords us: a built-in spiritual opportunity to be lifelong learners. It’s what the people of Israel experienced for 40 years in the wilderness. It’s what Jesus experienced for 40 days in the wilderness—and he was the Son of God!
Cammy’s remark reminds me of all this and of the intentional discipline required to push ourselves to new levels of maturity—levels we might otherwise never reach because of the law of inertia: things at rest tend to stay at rest. What is true in physics is also true in spirituality.
We have three weeks until Easter—three weeks to push ourselves beyond what we already “know” in order to think, feel, and experience something we have never considered before. It is a question we should always have in the back of our minds: “Am I continuing to mature, continuing to grow?”
Come Easter, may our answer be an excited, “YES!”
Not yet grown up,
Matt Gaston
Led Pastor, FUMC Plano
