Modern Maturity

I am writing to you fathers,

because you know him who is

from the beginning.

-1 John 2: 13a

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of maturity lately.  Honestly, as I approach my 43rd birthday in a little over a month, there are lots of times where I still don't quite feel like a grown-up. Since Father's Day was yesterday, I see that lots of you have really amazing Dads, I do too.  Some of you, maybe not so much, or maybe some of you have lost your amazing Dad, and just can't do the social media thing yet.  What I found interesting though, as I suppose I do on Mother's Day and Memorial Day and pretty much any other day that honors a certain segment of the population is that the sentiments were so very unanimous and flattering.

I can think of times when I have seen my Dad doing really impressive things, like when he would preach a really good sermon where people would laugh and cry and be challenged.  People would say things like, "Wow, your Dad is something else."  I never really had a problem with the "american dad" image problem, where we think our Dads are stooges because so many of our cultural father figures are bumbling idiots (or worse). 

I have had friends whose relationships with their fathers are strained, and maybe even broken, and I have been thankful for the fact that mine never has been, but I am most thankful for the fact that I can think of my Dad without necessarily creating a myth out of him. I have seen my Dad mess things up and I have seen him succeed brilliantly. I have seen my Dad pushed past his breaking point and keep going. I have seen my Dad lose a son and I have seen him welcome over half a dozen grandchildren, not always under the best of circumstances. I have seen my Dad tired and run down, and I have seen him catch fire with an idea that drove both of us across an ocean to walk an ancient Pilgrimage.

Our Camino journey was a microcosm of a lifetime relationship, we experienced joy, struggle, blisters, shin splints, grief, gratitude, failure, accomplishment, we got on each other's nerves and we rejoiced at each other's presence, it was not all one thing or another, but day by day we walked nearly 500 miles.

It occurs to me that maybe the worst thing I could do to my kids (other than abusing or abandoning them) is to let them grow up without seeing their Dad be human.  It's tempting to try and be superman, but that path usually actually leads you to become Darth Vader.  The drive to be strong and invulnerable and get those accolades for being a dependable "always there" kind of Dad is pretty tempting. At some level I want my kids to think I'm a hero, but I'm actually thinking that it's probably better for them to realize I'm not, I mean it will be better for them to grow up with an actual Dad rather than some ego-inflated idea of one.

When we idolize what maturity looks like we do actual maturity disservice, and by extension we look past the actual mature people who are there to show us.  We want every old person to be Yoda, and so we miss the goal altogether.  Maturity is the ability to sort out truth, find what is truly good in life, it is earned by experience and should be tempered in wisdom, but if you invent some pure vision of what that looks like, you're never going to find it.  Sometimes you have to sort through some serious crankiness to get at what maturity is really like, it can hide under layers of cynicism and have some really bitter spots where lessons learned were just too hard.

All things considered, it's a shame that we wait so very long to actually consider ourselves grown-up these days.  We're pushing our adolescence into our thirties, and maybe even into our forties (says the guy with a Millennium Falcon and a three foot Darth Vader action figure in his Pastor's Study).  I think part of that is that we have not been shown what a healthy maturity looks like, it doesn't mean you have it all together and always make the right decision, it means you learn to deal with life, even the hard parts, without becoming small and bitter.  Maybe sometimes that means letting the kid in you breath a little bit, maybe it means giving yourself permission to break up a little at times, maybe it means just learning to be a better human than you were yesterday.  Maybe that's the plan, and it has been from the beginning.