If you want to mature, you’re going to have to suffer.
Actually, that’s not quite right. You are going to suffer, that’s the nature of life under the sun. Some of that will be petty, some of it will be serious, and (heaven-forfend) some of it will be so psychologically scarring that you’ll be getting over it for a long time.
In of itself that won’t make you mature, but it will be the venue of your testing (1 Peter 4). It will give you the opportunity to endure and in so doing develop character (Romans 5). This is what we call maturity, a growing Christlikeness (2 Corinthians 3) and a growing wisdom (Luke 2) that happens through being broken like bread.
We have to learn to find God in his hiddenness, to encounter him in the pit of pain, to allow his rod and staff to guide us through the valley (Psalm 23), in order to grow up.
This is, I contend, what Jesus meant by Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted, but that’s not what I want to address directly today.
Suffering is normal
This is not how the world was originally designed to be—though maturity through testing is how the world was meant to be, but Adam failed the kingly test that Jesus passed—and it is not how the world will one day be.
However, our cultures think suffering is to be avoided rather than learned from, and often act as though it’s a terrible and unexpected imposition on us. It would be good if someone warned us.
The Church doesn’t always do much better. Some treat suffering as a lack of faith (more common than we’d like to admit), others as a deeply confusing reality because we expected God to bless us transactionally, and others speak as though Christians in the West don’t suffer (I hear this a lot, and then people wonder what’s wrong with them when they do).
It is of course true that Western suffering is different, we are unlikely to die in famines, less likely to die in plagues, and face fewer natural disasters. The suffering of the average Christian is much more likely to be psychological, but if following Jesus isn’t costing you anything that we could group under the catch all category of ‘suffering’ then are you actually following him? It’s likely that those sufferings will be ‘small’—though this won’t be true for some in every church of the land—but they’re no less real for that.
We need preparing for it
Churches should speak and teach as though this is true. It’s utterly bewildering to so many young Christians I meet that their lives are marked by difficulty. The prolonged feeling of the absence of God in the midst of it is also bamboozling, but so utterly ordinary that almost every older Christian could tell these stories. Of course, they don’t know any older Christians.
Preach on it, teach on it, expect it as normal. No one needs to work out their grief publicly, but people should talk about the need to mourn all sorts of things in life. We do not yet live in the land of the living. We need help to learn how to die.
Maturity is going to hurt
We don’t recognise that growing up is going to be deeply painful, even if for most it amounts to the ordinary knocks of getting married and bringing up children (or of not doing those things) as we’re slowly broken like bread over many years. We don’t acknowledge that maturity will not happen without suffering.
Tears are like seeds, one day they will grow and flower into something of worth. Or, to be more accurate, they can be. This is not a burden to place on those in the midst of abject awfulness—I’ve experienced that one myself, the constant need to know what God is ‘doing’ in middle of it becomes a weapon to afflict those who are in pain—but as we grieve and mourn and live our lives we are offered the opportunity to learn wisdom and to mature.
A Marker for Leadership
We should look in our leaders—I know, I know, I’m against ‘leadership,’ but I mean elders and deacons—for evidence of mourning and grief that leads to maturity. For those seeds that are starting to fruit.
I was made an elder much too young, in my twenties. I’m still too young really in my late thirties. This tends to lead to a faster breaking than we would choose, for the Lord needs to give you a chance to grow up fast. I would be wary of inflicting that on young potential office holders, though there will be necessities and situations where you might.
This sort of maturity is to be prized, though those who gain it will have been humbled and made aware of their sin enough that they are likely to see how far they have to go rather than be delighting in where they’ve arrived at. It is good to delight in our progress (1 Timothy 4) but we should be aware we haven’t arrived. This is one of the reasons I’m generally wary of people who want to be pastors rather than feel a call of God that means they have to. There are again exceptions (and plenty of them!), and sometimes that comes from the naivete of not having seen church leadership up close, but it’s not a trait to look for. Maturity doesn’t desire position, but maturity will lead.
Either way, we all need to grow up into Christ, we all need to mature, we all need to gain character. Which will mean we all need to go through the Test, we all need to endure suffering.
Photo by Jeremy Wong on Unsplash
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