How to Adult
By: Rev. Carolyn Moore, Master of Divinity 1998, President of Asbury Theological Seminary’s Alumni Council
This hand is where you are, and this hand is where you want to be. The gap between these two hands … that’s where frustration breeds. That gap tells me something is missing, and how I respond to this gap makes all the difference in the world.
How are you handling that gap?
A few years ago, during a Kingdom Conference, Dr. Kitty Harris of Texas Tech University led a great teaching and discussion about addiction and recovery. She talked about this gap. She taught that in order to mature emotionally, and feel “normal,” people need these basic needs met:
- Physical safety – I need to know I’m safe.
- Emotional security – I need to know I’m heard.
- Identity – I need to know who I am.
- Competence – I need to know I’m capable.
- Belonging – I need to know I have a place.
- Mission – I need to know I have a purpose.
Places, purposes, and people: you find all these things in the Garden of Eden.
But we don’t live in the Garden of Eden. We live on this side of Genesis 3, which means most of us are missing at least one of these things. Consequently, we have gaps between our “real” and our “ideal.”
Those gaps between where we are and where we want to be (the gap between real and ideal), can create all kinds of pain and frustration. That leaves us with a choice. We can make that a holy frustration, or we can get stuck there in that gap, stunting our emotional and spiritual growth.
That gap is where the enemy of your soul hangs out. In fact, that gap is what led to the original sin. The enemy of our souls got Eve to notice the gap that exists between imperfect people and a perfect God. Then, once she was focused on the gap rather than God, he said, “Isn’t that gap … painful?” And while it hadn’t been in the moment prior, it became so the moment she began to focus on it.
That’s the curse of the gap. The more we look at it, the bigger it gets. We become horribly aware of what is missing. And then we focus on that feeling while the gap just gets bigger. To make the feeling go away, to try to make the gap disappear, or to “feel normal” again. As Kitty Harris would say we work too much, we become needy in our relationships, we get addicted to things that ease the pain (which then create more pain), we begin to expect too much from other people, and we do other compulsive things we hope will “fix” it. We want so desperately to fill that gap. And of course none of the things we do will span that gap, but that doesn’t stop us from trying.
Does this sound familiar? So that gap becomes kind of a deal; a proving ground.
Well-meaning Christians tell us “Jesus fixes the gap” and in one sense, he does. In the most basic sense of providing a path back to God, Jesus is our bridge.
But Jesus doesn’t magically fix gaps. Our circumstances don’t magically change, our compulsions don’t magically disappear, our pain doesn’t automatically ease, and we don’t always grow up and grow out of our dysfunctions just because we follow Jesus.
What Jesus offers is not magic. What Jesus offers is sanctification. You should write that down.
Sanctification is the process of maturing our perspective so that we no longer focus on the gaps. It involves taking a creation-up perspective. Instead of saying, “How can I fix this?” … but learning instead to see life from the Kingdom down … seeing myself through the eyes of Christ … who gives grace for the gaps as he calls me to use them to grow up.
Sanctification is how Christians adult.
And this is the gift Paul gives us in his letters to the New Testament church. He paints picture after picture of what it means to be sanctified. To grow up. And if I had to choose one verse from Paul’s writings to characterize the sanctified life, I think I’d vote for Ephesians 4:15. It is as good a mission statement for Christian maturity as any verse in the whole of scripture.
Ephesians 4:15 – “Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”
This line should come with sound effects, like a siren or an alarm. Something to warn you it’s coming, so you can duck. This line is a revolution in twenty words, speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.
Speak truth in love (like anyone even knows what that means any more)
I mean … we’re in an election season. When is the last time we’ve heard anyone speak the truth in love? Which is just a shame. We’ve become so used to spin, which is incredibly detrimental to real community. We’ve learned to couch everything for personal gain, so that the norm for public discourse is much more argument than advocacy … more about my own provision and protection than the common good.
Meanwhile, real truth wrapped in real love requires real trust. Write that down.
I’m thinking about chapter 5 in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he calls the people out for how they’ve handled a guy in their community who is sleeping with his father’s wife. You get the sense they won’t confront the guy, so Paul says, “Shouldn’t your heart break for this person?” Paul is desperate for the Corinthian community to get what he’s teaching the Ephesians. In the face of significant dysfunction, he is prescribing a prophetic lifestyle. He wants them to learn how to speak the truth in love.
He tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 and 14 that the headwaters of a prophetic lifestyle is the practice of genuine love.
The prophetic word doesn’t begin with sin. It begins with a broken heart.
Paul says that when an unbeliever is confronted with loving truth, “he is laid bare … the secrets of his heart are disclosed and falling on his face … he worships”.
Brothers and sisters, this is what the Church of Jesus Christ needs most in this age. We need people who will confront sin not from a soapbox, but face to face in loving and redemptive ways. We need people who are not afraid to care for each other by speaking truth in love. We need people who walk this life out so fully that others are laid bare just by watching it. The Church of Jesus Christ is starving for people willing to live out a prophetic lifestyle.
Grow up in every way, Paul says. Every way. Not just the convenient ways (the places where it is more fun to be of age than not) but in every way. In speech and silence, in public and private, in submission and responsibility. In love, power and self-discipline (maybe especially self-discipline).
In other words, Paul counsels, act like adults. This flies in the face of so much that comes at us from every other direction. We’re encouraged to pander to our inner child, to coddle his or her pain beyond good sense, to keep putting Spiderman band-aids on gaping childhood wounds so we never actually have to heal. We are encouraged to a state of arrested development, spending far more time accommodating the child we used to be than encouraging the adult we can become.
If you’re not a child, then there comes a day when you need to let that child inside know, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you were wounded. I’m sorry you felt invisible. I’m sorry you didn’t feel safe, heard or valued. I’m sorry for everything in your life that didn’t go the way it should have gone. But it is time for the adult in the room to invite the child inside to have a seat so the adult can drive the bus.”
It sounds like my sister-in-law’s father was a great guy. Otis was his name. I met him at his funeral when his children and grandchildren stood up, and told some great stories about life out in the country. The family had a good bit of land out there, with dirt roads and fields out in the middle of nowhere. Otis owned a VW bus, and most of his children learned to drive on those dirt roads in that bus. He’d let them drive out there on those old dirt roads, even before they were old enough to drive. One grandson stood up and said, “Yeah, Grandaddy let me drive the bus. The first time I drove it I was four years old. We pulled off on this dirt road and he gave me the wheel. It was a blast, right up to the moment I turned the bus over into a ditch. Grandaddy wasn’t upset with me. His whole focus was on how to fix it so no one found out about it.”
That’s what happens when children drive the bus.
So when the child inside is making the choices, it can be thrilling, but can also drive our lives into a ditch. This is why Paul calls us to grow up by doing the recovery work, healing work, and confession work.
It is time to grow up, Paul says. Heal. Move on, because as it turns out, children living in adult bodies aren’t very happy. We will never get to the richness that is the good life if we never challenge ourselves to maturity.
Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way …
“into him who is our head, into Christ.”
You know how little babies have heads that are bigger than their bodies? It is so cute in a baby. It would look odd in an adult. God is calling us to grow up into our head. Why? Because if the head is Christ, the head is mature and the rest of us need to grow into that so we don’t keep falling over from the unproportioned head and body.
I know I’m not there yet. I know it when I hear stories like Carrie and Tony’s. Carrie and Tony are missionaries to India. Carrie is an amazing woman. She is a gifted teacher and leader. Tony was a math teacher in the U.S. But then God called Carrie and Tony to leave their work here to go live in northern India to reach Muslims there. By all accounts, they were clearly called. God provided. He settled them in the perfect neighborhood, and gave them strategies for becoming part of the Muslim community in that city. On the surface, everything seemed great.
It IS great, for Tony, who daily takes his motorcycle down the Muslim alleyways, where he’s greeted by everyone, invited into shops for tea, who’s now built enough trust with this community that the religious leaders are calling him to religious events and into spiritual conversations. But it’s a different story for Carrie. She has also been called to live like Christ in that community, but for her that means wearing a burqa. She is mostly confined to her home. She has no status as a teacher or leader. In fact, in that society she is not valued at all.
The Mission Society staffer who supports Carrie says that “unless you’ve experienced it, it may be difficult to comprehend the deep identity crisis this evokes or the painful surrender this requires. It’s a struggle to daily accept the humiliation of the incarnation in this cultural context. But God continues to do His work in and through Carrie in the invisible world that Indian women live in. And it’s in this humble, hidden place that Carrie is experiencing Jesus as she gathers small groups of women together to study the Bible.”
These are women who get what it feels like to be invisible in a way I couldn’t even begin to fathom. She invites these women into her home and she shares her story and how Jesus has healed her, and is healing her, and her story is bringing healing to other women. Her story stops me in my tracks. Because her life is not about building big things that draw big crowds. Her life isn’t even about doing things that make sense. The only way she can do this is because she knows who she is and whose she is.
This is very grown-up work; this is the work of being the incarnation. It isn’t for children. It isn’t work for people who’d rather focus on the gaps and use them as an excuse to avoid the work of sanctification.
Carrie’s story inspires me. She has taken this frustration that breeds in that gap and she has turned it into a holy frustration, and a broken heart for those who don’t yet know. Rather than focusing on her SELF (she is not safe, she is not known, she is not heard), she has turned her frustration into a broken heart for the women of India who are not safe and not known.
This is what is means to be sanctified.
This is what it means to grow up in every way into Him.
This is how truth becomes love.
This is incarnation.
Thanks, Carolyn. It is nearly always a comforting challenge to hush and listen to what you have to communication–certainly true here. In Christ’s strong love, Will Hensel, Houston (MDiv 2000)