So I Guess This Is Growing Up
From The Pastor’s Desk—
One of my favorite bands came out with a new album at the end of last year; a welcome surprise as they disbanded about a decade ago. I first started listening to their music after the split, when I happened to see their lead singer performing as a solo act. I moved backwards through their discography, which served as a time machine of sorts. The band’s music was full of the energy, loss, and yearning that featured in the music I loved as a teen. In many ways, it was a throwback to the songs of the 50’s and 60’s: drag races and lost love, first dates and daring chances, distilled into a rock and roll beat with a punk rock edge.
All of this led to a bit of confusion on my part when listening to the new album. One of the lyrics particularly caught my attention: “you were young and beautiful, and I was dumb and beautiful.” Had this song been recorded earlier in the band’s career, I’m sure they would have opted for something more like “...and I was dumb and pitiful”: full of the angst and self recrimination so emblematic of the songs of those holding tightly to a nostalgic past. Instead, the singer acknowledges the callowness of youth, while offering his younger self a bit of grace and understanding.
Hopefully, as each of us matures, we can offer a similar grace to our own past selves. Paul famously wrote: 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. Each of us chooses how we will live with the person we once were, as we move closer to the person that we are, and will become. If we can offer grace, humor, and understanding to who we once were, we are better able to offer those same gifts to others we encounter.
Life, as so many have famously remarked, is a journey. As we mature we grow, and come to understand more of the worlds within ourselves, and without. We come to understand more about where God is calling us, both as individuals and as members of God’s church. Paul's words of advice to the church in Corinth continue: For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
As we journey ever forward to the day when all of us will know as fully as we have been fully known, may we continue to embrace all that this life has to offer. May we welcome the new things God is bringing into our lives with a grace that honors the love in which all good gifts are given.
—Pastor Jon
