Maturity Is Not How Long You Have Been Here

A person can be present for thirty years and be, in the parts that matter, roughly where they were in year three. This is not an insult. It is extremely common and it is rarely anybody being lazy. It happens because attendance is easy to measure and formation is not, so we measured the thing we could count and let it stand in for the thing we could not.

The Hebrew mind, which is the one the Scriptures were written in, does not think about this the way we do. It does not ask how much a person knows. It asks what a person has become, and it assumes the evidence will be visible in how they treat people who cannot repay them.

That is a harder examination and a fairer one.

Growth in this sense is not the accumulation of information. I say this as a teacher, and it costs me something to say it: I have known men who could reconstruct a passage in the original and could not hold a marriage together, and I have known women who could not read the original at all and whose households were the most ordered thing I have ever stood inside.

One of them was mature. It was not the one with the library.

What grows is not the store of what you know. It is the depth of what holds when you are under load. Roots, not height. And the ancient texts are relentless about this because a tall tree with no roots is not impressive. It is simply not yet fallen.

You have a real depth and it is not the number of years you have been present. It can be measured, and the measurement will probably not match the story you tell about yourself.