Growing-Up Childlike

I'm still reading, still savoring the book, I Go By Sea, I Go By Land. Here is what I read this morning:

"Thirteen seems a very difficult age... Life seems to be running past you and you can't catch it... and you feel happy one day and miserable the next and like people and don't like them all in one breath and Nobody Understands You."

I read that and thought, "Gee, some of us are thirteen for such a long, long time."

I know I was. Happy one day, miserable the next, liking people then not liking them and believing no one understood me. Yep, I spent probably twenty years being thirteen.

Oh, the misery of living like that. The seldom controlling my emotions and believing self-control was for everyone else. Believing everyone else was the one with the problem. And never growing-up or growing beyond my changeable feelings.

Childishness--that's what it was. And I did not begin to grow up until I gained control of my own emotions. Until I slipped out of the leash they had around my neck.

Child-likeness, though, is different. Now I'm growing-up child-like,  with wonder, curiosity and appreciation of art and music and nature and wanting my life to be so full, that even the corners are flooded and not empty. Or maybe not even have any corners at all--just a circle of love and peace and joy.

Child-likeness is everything that's good about being a child. Childishness is everything that's bad or lacking or mis-directed.

And I had to lose the childishness before I could grow-up happy and child-like. Childishness and happiness could not co-exist inside me. One of them had to go.

It took a choice--no, many choices-- on my part. And  courage--and lots of letting go of that which was old and familiar.



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"You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness." ... Ephesians 4:22-24


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