Growing up is a lifelong task. I haven’t always known this. I thought it was something that happened along with your physical growth—when you were big outside, you would be finished inside. When I was seven years old, in the second grade, the Christmas program at my grammar school involved a crèche scene with Mary, Joseph, and a little doll in a crib. Playing Joseph that year was a sixth-grader. I watched, awed, as he stood absolutely still, not the slightest movement or twitch, for a half-hour. I concluded that when I got to the sixth grade and could do what he did, I would be grown up.
Then, at, just entering college as a freshman, for the first time in my life away from home for an extended period of time, I felt like a stranger in a very scary place. I was insecure, frightened, well over my head, overwhelmed by everything going on around me. The first semester I took a course in astronomy. In that class was a 21-year-old woman, attractive, bright, articulate, composed. When I turned 21 and became a senior, I figured, I would be as confident and finished as she looked. I would be grown up.
I have since stopped making any assumptions about growing up. I have slowly begun to realize it is a lifelong task. No matter how long I live, there will never be a time when I do not have to work at it.
St. Paul talked about growing up in his first letter to the Corinthians.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Simply put away our childishness and immaturities. But you know it doesn’t work that easily. Events in a person’s early life will influence that person later in life and all through the years until it is addressed and dealt with. It is not so easy to put away childish things.
When we are hurt as children, when bad things happen to us or around us, these traumas stick with us and we grow around them. They become buried inside us and affect our development. I remember a member of this church who reached the age of 98, yet every time we spoke she would talk about the trouble she had had with her mother as a child. Seventy years after she began to move out of childhood, that struggle and its marks on her psyche were as fresh as yesterday.
The other day I was talking to a member of the church who is seeing a psychologist. “All my therapist wants to talk about is my childhood,” she said. “I want to get on with my life, but every time I bring something up he goes back to my childhood.”
“My therapist does the same thing,” I responded. “It annoys me because I don’t want to go back to my childhood. But I do know that if I don’t, I will not work through the emotional material I need to so I can grow up and be a more healthy person.”
Growing up is a lifelong task. It involves enormous inner work so we can get free from those things that continue to bind us to the early part of our lives. From time to time I have been haunted by an insight from John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower. He said, “If the problem you are dealing with today is the very same problem you were dealing with a year ago, that means you are not growing.”
So what can we do to continue to grow up? What can we do to realize our full adulthood? First of all, take charge. Take charge of your life and do it with courage. Take charge, take responsibility for who you are and what has happened to you. Do not resist chances to grow. Do the work your life has given you, and get free from what is holding you back. It takes real courage to look inside, but when we put our hearts, minds, souls and strength into it, growth will happen.
Dr. Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Traveled, said, “Take on the problems and issues of your life. Do it with courage.” He said,
Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.
I would wager that 98% of us here today have some issue we are not dealing with. We know it is causing difficulties in our lives and holding us back, but we have sealed it away in a vault. We will never make progress unless we take it out and work it through. Scott Peck says, “We cannot solve problems by any other means than by solving them.”
Here is a classic character that we all can recognize. As a young man he had dreams for his life, but he had a handicap, an ailment of some kind. He had to get healed before he could really live his life, he thought. So he did as many people of his day did in Jerusalem, he went to a place with magical healing powers, a pool in a place called Bethesda. Every once in a while the waters in this pool were stirred up. The people believed it was caused by the movement of an angel. The first person who could get into the pool after this ripple would receive the benefit of the angel and would be healed. So the young man decided to go there.
One day passed, another day passed, and another and another and another, and still he was not able to be the first into the pool. Perhaps others were more organized, had specific plans for getting into the water first; perhaps they had loved ones around them helping them. He was never able to do it, and over time became discouraged and bitter. He began to complain that people were not helpful, people cared only about themselves. For years he tried, and failed, and after a while he was no longer even trying. He was off in a corner feeling sorry for himself and complaining about how hard-hearted everyone was.
We can recognize this state of mind. We have been there ourselves, and we have seen other people there. The man was stuck, unable to do what he needed to do to get well, blaming everyone else.
Jesus discovered him one day and spoke to him. This is the conversation as I imagine it in modern language. When Jesus approached him, asking how he was, the man answered bitterly, “Not so good. I have been sick for 38 years, coming to this pool to get healed, and every time the water is stirred by the angel and I try to get in, someone gets in ahead of me. Nobody will let me in, nobody will help me. People are mean and selfish.” I imagine he went on and on about his sad situation.
Jesus listened, and then asked him, very directly, very clearly, “Do you want to get well?” The man looked at him in a strange way. “What do you think I’ve been doing here for 38 years?”
Jesus asked again, “Do you want to get well?” and the man responded, “Yes.”
“All right. Pick up your mat and walk.” And to his great surprise the man was able to get up, pick up his mat and walk away. When I read this I wonder if his original affliction had been compounded over the years, and maybe even replaced, by an emotional sickness. Something in his early life had affected him in such a way that he could not deal with conflict, with stress, with challenge, and so he took the easy way out and blamed everyone else.
How many of us have something holding us back yet we don’t yet have the courage to take it on and start the healing process? Remember what Scott Peck said: “The only way to solve a problem is to solve it.”
For many years I had a mentor, a member of this church, named Homer Surbeck. Homer had a fascinating story. He grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, where his father was a Presbyterian minister. When he was five years old and in the first grade, his teacher came by to talk with his parents. He was in the next room and overheard the conversation. The teacher had come to say that Homer was not doing well in school and probably not very bright. They should not have any great expectations for him. “Very little is likely to come from this young man,” Homer heard his teacher say.
The teacher had wanted to prepare Homer’s parents for disappointment, but his mother and father listened, thanked the teacher, and reacted very differently. They could have given themselves, and Homer, a good excuse for him to remain in a dependent state, not growing up or doing very much with his life. Instead, they decided to help him make something of himself, taking full responsibility for his own growth. They taught him how to grasp the central idea of whatever he was reading. Night after night they sat with him, patiently guiding him as he learned how to read thoroughly and intelligently. As a result of his acquiring this focus and discipline, Homer graduated from high school first in his class, and from college first in his class. He went on to Yale University law school, and also graduated first in his class.
I said to somebody one day, “You know, Homer Surbeck is brilliant!” He responded, “No, I have watched Homer for a long time. He is a man of ordinary intelligence, but he is the most disciplined man I have ever met.”
Homer once took me to lunch and, hoping to become as successful as he had been, I asked him, “What do you think is the key ingredient to success?” Just like that he said, “Self-discipline.” He was talking to a young man who had almost no discipline. I was swirling around, without any focus, certainly no inner discipline—which has been one of the challenges of my life. But in order for us to grow up, to work through the issues, to overcome whatever hurdles we have been given in life, we need self-discipline. Take on your life! Take on every part of it with courage! A big part of it is how you discipline yourself to grow as you need to.
When we enter this world as babies we are concerned with getting our needs filled. Babies are self-centered; they have to be, to survive. As we grow we become affectionate, and aware of others. But in order for us to be fully grown up we have to be grown up in our ability to love, to understand that other people are as real as we are, and as dear to God as we are, that their concerns are as important as ours. When we have not finished the job of growing up, when we are stuck in old patterns, in childish ways, we have trouble putting our issues aside to see other people in their fullness.
Jesus, in His last words to His disciples, said, “A commandment I give unto you: Love one another as I have loved you.” What a tremendous challenge—and we cannot meet it if we refuse to grow up, if we are still struggling with the issues of childhood.
Morton Kelsey, an Episcopalian rector who once taught at Notre Dame University, a wonderful mind and great spirit, wrote about a time he was on an airplane going to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit his daughter, a student there. As he looked out of the airplane window, he realized they were flying over the home of his brother, from whom he was estranged. The plane continued on and they flew over the town where his father and stepmother lived. There was trouble in that relationship as well. He was going to visit his daughter because their relationship was badly strained. When she was 15 years old she had said that the worst possible fate for anybody was to be born into the family of a minister. She was so disillusioned.
A friend had told him, “Morton, that child needs you as a father. Get on a plane, go out there on her turf and listen to your daughter.” On the plane, words from the Prayer of St. Francis came into his mind:
Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.
Kelsey suddenly realized he had been looking to be loved and understood instead of striving to love and understand. That insight started a shift in his attitude which not only brought about a good visit and reconciliation with his daughter, but over time improved all his relationships.
I close with the greatest words ever written on love, by St. Paul: First Corinthians, chapter 13. This is a description of the kind of grown-up love we can aspire to.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
We are not fully grown up until we learn to love. Let us pray.
For this time together, Lord, for the challenge that we have in growing up, for the difficulties that challenge us, give us Your grace, Your mind, Your spirit, and Your love. Amen.