What is Maturity?

Post 347

Humanity-- in all its maturity, here in the last days of our existence as we know it--, while imagining ourselves dying of old age, is really just the young girl only now blooming into womanhood and looking for a husband, for another kind of life than what she has always known; We are the fully-mature fetus eager to be born into a whole new world. Here in the last days of preparation, Humanity-- in all our maturity-- is still but a child. but don’t tell her that; it will offend her feelings of long worked-for mature readiness for what comes next.
Why do we weep and ache for our daughters when we give them away at the alter in joy and pride? How can we be both happy and sad, full and empty, at the very same moment? How is it both a loss and a gain? It’s the same reason why a woman screams in utter agony yet wants the cause so earnestly when she is giving birth. It’s the same reason why we Christians break down and sob in the most horrible suffering imaginable when a loved one dies, yet be so overwhelmed with peace and joy at knowing they have just been born into a whole new life that they spent all this time preparing for.
Is our daughter ready? Well it’s a little late to do anything about that now, so just enjoy the moment and let what comes come. The maturing preparation period is over and the future is theirs to experience in all its new youthful hopes of the next phase. A bride is a bride when she is married; not when she has reached a certain age. Even children die. We only have between now and then to do all we can to make them as ready as possible, all the while knowing that there is no point before the time comes when we run out of preparing to do. And the effort, while often painful, is supposed to be a joy to us: not by the law of duty, but by the yearning of love. Yet a lot of times we simply cannot see the joy in the struggle until she is standing at the altar and the purpose comes clear in the sudden loss of a job. We are never really ready when it finally comes, but there is a difference between ready and prepared.

As in the image of a parent among many, I have the opportunity to give such instruction to my spiritual children that some other shepherds as parents don’t have available to them, not because I am superior, but because I, like Paul, have counted all things but loss so that I might experience the most excellent knowledge of Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:8). It is my privilege therefore to pass on these special learned things that other preoccupied parents have never found and cannot comprehend (Philippians 3:14-15). Do I have all the answers? Of course not; I never claimed to, but let me boast a little and say that I think my spiritual children are in a class above the rest because they have been better prepared to fundamentally be excellent and useful citizens in that great kingdom.
I know this is true by principle because in its physical Typology; my dad did not abandon me to my piers as a youth to raise itself, but instead employed me before and after school as a kind of “indentured apprentice” in his own company, to learn from him principles, and conduct, and maturity, and skills, and character, while my piers were drinking and partying and getting into unguided mischief from a lack of long-range purpose.
I am not saying that I did not often feel “cheated out of my youth” or oppressed by the obligatory labors that my piers did not face, but I can say that at the same time I could understand the value, and submitted willingly if not joyfully for what it would return. I early saw the advantage by experience of having been thus brought up. And today I would not trade it for the world.
It is no different spiritually, and I know that my regular readers can intimately understand this as true.

In the last Post (*1) you may have been a bit disappointed to contemplate that marriage to the Lamb has more obligations attached to it than we really want to contemplate right now; “I just want to be married!” And to be frank; that simplistic and joyful feeling is really OK. In fact, Don’t ever loose it!
But what kind of a parent would I be if I didn’t help prepare you as best I could to have a happy and full marriage by instructing you in the mindframe that will insure you are ready to play that role in all its meaning?
Some earnest and faithful parents never learned many of those secrets from their parents, but I have had the privilege of both being guided and seeking them out by costly exclusive focus (Proverbs 25:2+Daniel 2:27-28=30) and so can pass them on to you if you are willing.
My little sister learned as a youth to cook from my mother, who was a universally acknowledged extremely good cook. As a pre-teen my sister was a virtual little wife in the kitchen. Did her ability to cook qualify her to be a wife? Nope. But it sure didn’t hurt in the desire to make a pleasant home when she was. The skills she learned as a child in preparation are still daily applicable in many ways; while other wives and mothers and friends glory in their ability to make Mac-n-Cheese from a box so they don’t always have to eat at McDonalds.
What is maturity? It really depends on what you are asking. Is the Earth’s humanity finally mature? In the eyes of the given timeline of expectation, the answer is "Yes." But that doesn’t mean she is well prepared for the next phase that that maturity has been reaching. So we see a distinction between maturity and coming of age.

Can a young bride learn to be a good cook on the job? It’s entirely possible, but like the under-qualified elected official who never pre-read the Constitution let alone can apply its principles in daily practice; it certainly is not as easy now that the daily obligations of the job are upon her. And while she is quickly learning that among her other duties; “My sister” is easily learning more advanced and timely things by focus because she has long had those basics well in hand. Who doesn’t want to marry a good cook? But who wants to marry a good cook that is so fundamentally unfaithful that she spits in his food while preparing it, because she is mad at him over a momentary issue? Who wants to endure hearing his new bride learn to play scales on the piano, rather than delight his heart with her timely pre-obtained talent and delivery that reveals far more than just the effort she put into preparing to be a good wife?

“Well done, though good and faithful girl, thou hast been faithful over your preparations, I will give you mistress authority to govern my whole house: will you marry me?” Matthew 25:21 applied.

Right now we are trying to stay focused on making a highway for our God, and I was going to wait and divulge this next tid-bit when I later expanded on the parables of the kingdom of heaven, but let me just here say that the “many things,” referenced in the Matthew 25 parable, are “children (*2),” couched in quotes for deeper meaning. A young woman really, really wants to be a wife… until she is. Then she really, really wants to be a mother.
A parent already knows this, and prepares the child for the natural future that they might not be interested in right now. Otherwise, the child will most certainly enter the job unprepared, and psychologically limited in far more ways than simply a missing list of skills. The first works is the disciplined mentality to learn, in the selfless desire to be pleasing and useful to your spouse: i.e. Humility in love as a simplistic description (James 4:10, I Peter 5:5-7).
If you get on the job without this foundational perspective of servant, you have a very high probability of turning out to be a childless, selfish, bitter tyrant of willfulness to cover for the suddenly blaring inadequacies. Or so we see revealed in both marriage and politics today.

There are certainly a lot of pleasures to be had in marriage. And marriage can take on a myriad of wonderful variations in the experience. But nature itself shows us that offspring are among the few foundational purposes of marriage. Yet the deceitfulness of sin can easily beguile us into thinking that marriage is to provide me with the utmost in happiness, and children would just steel my self-indulgent pleasures. If you get to heaven with the psychology that despises “childrearing” as a theft of self-indulgence, you may be surprised when heaven has no use for you! (Matthew 25:41-46).
Maturity is that which is rightly prepared to serve its purpose.
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(*1) In response to Matthew 25:21: “’Hmmm a ruler huh? and over a lot of things? That’s the reward for being a faithful steward of a few of the master’s things? Where’s the luxury in that!?’-- Right?”

(*2) It has been quite a while since I posted the foundational reason for using Cinderella as a Typology, so I thought I would re-post a link to that root: Post 248, The Cinderella Story (http://when-did-reason-die.blogspot.com/2012/06/cinderella-story.html).
See note "(*1)" at the bottom of that post for an insight into the “children” described in this Post.
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