Ages and Stages

1 Corinthians 13:11

New International Version (NIV)

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

When I was little, I had all sorts of expectations of where I would be at this point in my life. My friends and I would play pretend all the time, and we all just pretended that we were young people, never younger than fifteen and never older than twenty-five.  We always pretended to have big parties all the time and to live in exotic places. Whether it was Barbies or "house," all of our pretending was about the future, and we never had any rules.

Overall, I was pretty wrong about about my future and what "growing up" entails.  Mostly, that's because I didn't understand much of the real world when I was young; I thought like a child. The concepts of bills, the pain of heartbreak, and the reality of responsibilities never crossed my mind. To me, adults had no restrictions. They had it made.

Now that I have actual responsibilities, I feel like an actual adult now. Still, I sometimes have that same understanding of adulthood as I used to have, and I don't like to be restricted by age now that I'm an "adult". To my dismay, though, that's not how the world works.  My parents still give me rules (no tattoos or borrowing the car to drive across the country) and even if they didn't, the law still gives me rules (can't rent cars from most companies until I'm 25, no alcohol until I'm 21, etc.). Sometimes, I want to throw a fit about it. Too often, I tell my parents, "I need to be treated like an adult!"

How funny is that? I am supposedly "grown up" and yet I'm still thinking like a child, by glorifying the concept of being an adult.  I'm admitting to this because I know we all have experienced it at one time or another. As children, we don't want to be seen as babies; as teenagers, we don't like to be seen as children; as adults, we don't like to be seen as teenagers.

Listen to this quote from C.S. Lewis, though: “Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” 

 

As embarrassing as it is to admit, I have been acting like a child lately. Even the Bible tells me that I need to grow up (1 Corinthians 13:11).  The only comfort that I have is knowing that I'm not alone here; I'm sure many people my age face the same struggles with wanting to be accepted as an adult. 

 

Nonetheless, we need to learn to accept the positives and negatives that come with our age (restrictions and all), and embrace the stage we are in our lives right now, whether we are seniors in high school or senior citizens. Why get upset over the things we can't control?  Rather than focus on our expectations of our stage in life, we should learn to focus on trusting that God has it covered.  Live your life, love God, and everything else will fall into place.

 

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