What I Thought | Part One

This is what I thought. I thought spiritual maturity was more less like puberty—inevitable, irresistible, unstoppable.

I thought by the time I turned 18 I would be rock solid; and I thought by the time I turned 20 I would be the freakin' Rock of Gibraltar.

In short, I thought by the time I finished college, I would be the sort of person I looked up to in high school.

This is not exactly how things turned out.

I was talking with a new friend today. He is 22. He said, “I’m at that age when I’m thinking I should be growing up and getting more mature, you know?”

“What a coincidence,” I said… “Me too.”

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Don’t get me wrong: I don’t act like a kid—haven’t for quite a while. But I have to admit the road to maturity is quite a bit longer than I believed when I believed I could get there well ahead of my 30th birthday.

And why did I believe that? I’m pretty sure it’s an impression I got from adults I knew when I was a teenager. I can’t point to anyone who actually said it in so many words…so let’s say I probably inferred it from the fact that nobody I knew with any spiritual leadership—and I mean nobody—ever talked about weakness or struggle or stumbling one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back unless it was a story anchored firmly in the past tense.

From that I reasoned that a person as smart as me could learn from other people’s mistakes; that I could compress my spiritual journey into a matter of months rather than years—certainly the notion of decades never occurred to me. I synthesized a gospel of automatic change and then propagated it to anyone who would listen. I learned Bible verses that supported this way of seeing the world and I learned to talk about my faith as a before-and-after narrative with a total change inserted between the before and the after: Utter darkness, then BAM! total illumination. One step.

There’s a sense, I suppose, in which I may not have been entirely wrong.

There is a sense in which—as the apostle Paul told the Christians in Corinth—people who are “in Christ” are “new creations.”[1] It’s a new day; everything has changed; the old is gone. Period.

That’s fine and good and true as far as it goes.

Bu it seems to me now that I didn’t follow it far enough. I understood it as a done deal, like turning on a light that takes a room from dark to light with one click. It’s a little like someone saying, “I’m here!” when she lands in New York, meaning she’s arrived in North America from wherever, and in that sense she is here and no longer there. But, depending on her mode of travel, she is still hours, maybe even days, from being here if here for the person who longs to be with her means Vancouver or Seattle or San Francisco.

Saying I was a new creation in Christ was a statement about my condition that was true as far as it went. It simply didn’t go far enough.

I've come to believe that being a new creation is more like a dawning than switching on a light. There may well be a moment before dawn and a moment after dawn, between which lies a moment observers would agree was dawn itself (though I’m not sure I understand how that would be measured, or from where, or why).

The move from darkness to light at dawn is accomplished by a turn of the earth to face the sun. Things on earth don’t glow from within; the glow is reflected light and all things become clearer and sharper as they become fully illumined.

('’)



[1] 2 Corinthians 5:17