Monday, July 27, 2009

What is Maturity?

The American Heritage dictionary defines "maturity" as The state or quality of being fully grown or developed. Lately I have been thinking about what it truly means to be emotionally and mentally mature. We are constantly learning new things and adding to our knowledge and range of emotional experiences. At what point are the mind and emotions "fully developed"?

I was talking with a friend of mine who is in her early teens recently, and as we talked I was impressed by the range of topics that she was able to talk about. I thought she was really mature. But as we continued to talk, I started actually listening to what she was saying, and I realized that she hadn't really thought through what she was saying. More than likely, she was just repeating what she had just heard other people say. I realized that she wasn't really as mature for her age as I though she was.

Then I started wondering-at what point is someone truly mature? Physical maturity is obvious. Mental and emotional maturity-not so much. As my experience illustrates, someone can seem mature without actually being mature. This is prevalent in our society. We have twelve and thirteen year olds dating when they're not even close to being ready for marriage.

As I started thinking about it, I started to reach the conclusion that emotional and mental maturity means being able to think for oneself, and then being able to to live out one's life in a productive and (especially for a Christian) God-honoring way. In other words, a mature person's opinions are their opinions because they have thought through the issues for themselves, taking into account facts, wisdom from elders, opinions of other people, and thinking critically through the issue to come to their own conclusions. And once they form their opinions or convictions, they are able to live them out in their daily life.

I searched for the word "mature" on biblegateway.com, and the following verse came up:

But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.-Hebrews 5:14

So, I think I was on the right track. A mature person is one who is able to know was is good and distinguish it from what is evil (requiring the ability to think for oneself-the mature have "trained themselves", they don't rely on others to distinguish good from evil for them), and applies it-"who by constant use".

I realized after thinking about all this that I am not as mature as I once thought I was. A lot of my opinions are mine only because I have heard other people talk about them, not because I have taken time to think through the issues for myself. And just because I "know" good from evil doesn't mean I always utilize this knowledge.

Maturity is a lot more than just being able to talk about a range of "grown-up" subjects. Unless one is thinking for oneself and acting upon their knowledge, one is only feigning maturity.

Obviously, a big part of maturity is listening to the wisdom and counsel of others-"thinking for oneself" does not mean completely shutting out other's input (a very immature thing to do, actually). But it does mean having the ability to compare other's counsel against the Bible and sometimes, quite frankly, logic, to determine what truly is good counsel and what is not.

I definitely need to work on becoming more mature.

1 comment:

ModernSophist said...

I think a lot of the people have gotten it wrong or, at least, have not gotten it. Your quote of Hebrews might be on the right track, assmuing a context of internal monologue. I’ve recently been trying to sort out ‘maturity’ on my own, trying to understand what it is. The problem that I see, is that most people define ‘maturity’ as an opposite of ‘immaturity,’ so that, instead of it being a specific action on its own, it’s just not behaving a certain way. This says a lot, as though we naturally assume the immature actions first, or area always wary of them. But maturity isn't, as a lot of people tend to assign it, just a matter of being precocious or even cautious.

What we need is a more specific definition of maturity, and not just some general sense of doing good or making good decisions. I don’t think it has anything to do with what you choose do do, but how you make those choices. See what you think about my take on it, in “How to Be a Grownup”