Childishness 2-3-08
Once, when I was in the fourth grade, my mother took my sister and me to the mall to do some shopping. My mother was trying to give us our ten dollar allowances, but was hampered by the fact that she only had a twenty dollar bill. My pockets were, as usual, empty; but my sister still had her ten dollar bill from a previous allowance. My mother did what any rational adult could readily understand: she gave my sister the twenty dollar bill and took from her the ten dollar bill to give to me. I went ballistic! I can still, to this day, remember the confusion and anger resulting from seeing my sister handed a twenty dollar bill, while I was only receiving a ten dollar bill. I threw such a fit that my mother almost cancelled the shopping trip; I yielded only when faced with her wrath and promises of dire consequences. My mother had tried every way she could think of to get me to understand that in reality we had each only received ten dollars, but my childish mind was unable to grasp the concept. That’s one of the big differences between children and adults: adults possess the cognitive functions to understand and make judgments – children do not.
All children require protection and feeding, while they simultaneously have little accountability and no responsibility. As they grow up, they develop their basic core values and learn right and wrong from the adults around them. A child is among the easiest creatures to deceive (which is why child predators generally succeed when they can isolate a child), and so it falls to the adults around that child to give protection not only from physical harm, but also from intellectual and spiritual harm. A child is also incapable of making good nutritional decisions; this applies to the nutrition of both the body and the soul. Not only do the adults need to make sure that the child does not ingest something poisonous; they also need to make sure that the child is taking in the good nutrition – both physical and spiritual.
As children reach adolescence (usually around age thirteen), they enter a transitional phase in which they need less protection and feeding, and more guidance and mentorship. By this time the teenagers can feed and clothe themselves and, while still requiring protection, they can learn to spot dangers. They cannot, however, be trusted to always make sound judgments. Some teens go to the extremes of behavior and enter a dangerous life of drugs, promiscuity, and rebellion against authority (especially parental). Most simply make bad choices and learn from them as they go – hence the importance of mentors and parental guidance.
By the age of twenty, an individual is expected to act as an adult. This means that feeding and protection are gone (i.e. “get your own food” and “watch your own back”), and guidance is much harder to come by. Some adults try to retain the fun and excitement of their teenage years, and so they become a ridiculous spectacle by trying to act like a teenager. Adults should act like adults, by taking responsibility not only for their own actions, but also for the situations around them. They also should know to look to their own protection and feeding; no rational adult starves when food is available, and no rational adult allows someone else to endanger them. Why do many adults spiritually starve and walk spiritually naked? Because they seek to remain as children, allowing others to do for them what they do not want to do themselves.
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 childish ways behind me. (1 Corinthians 13:11 NIV)
An adult seeks wisdom and knowledge by reading the Bible for themselves and by obtaining guidance from mentors who have already achieved what the person wants.
Too many adults see responsibility as abrogable; they do not want to take time away from their desired activities so they seek to nullify their duty to protect and feed the children around them, and to guide and mentor the adolescents around them.
“And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:5-6 NIV)
But we cannot allow laziness and selfishness to invade our churches. We all have the duty to continually grow in knowledge and wisdom, and we also have the duty to help our brothers and sisters grow. Let us not act as adults like I did as a child: childishness is for children. Wisdom and graciousness is for adults.
-Charles Peterson