If you take a child and dress them in adult clothes; you still have a child under the clothing. They are still going to speak, think and understand as a child regardless what they are wearing.  A child can get away with saying or doing the wrong things much easier than an adult could, simply because they have not reached full maturity yet.

Now put an adult in the same outfit the child tried on and all of a sudden we expect a different behavior. We expect them to speak, think and understand on an entirely different level than we expected the child too.

If the adult were to act like a child, many of us would question what was wrong with them.  It just seems odd to see an adult speaking without a brain/ mouth filter, acting silly, not using manners, throwing tantrums or crying to get their way.

1 Corinthians 13:11 Is our reminder than when we were a child we  spoke, understood and thought as a child but when we became adults we put childish things away.

Some of you adults reading are physically and spiritually mature. Just because you are does not mean the adults around you are…  You may be around adults holding physical maturity but lack  spiritual maturity . You may be the one married to a babe in Christ instead of a spiritually mature believer in Christ; which can cause your spouse to look mentally immature. You may hold friendships with physically mature adults who lack the mental maturity needed for the friendship to bloom due to lack of spiritual maturity.  Some of you may be expecting a mature relationship with someone who is not your equal.  (Much like an adult and a child are not equals. You can expect different things from a child than from an adult. )

Some of you reading hold resentment, anger and hurt feelings towards certain adults in your life. You see their physical maturity and expect mental maturity but instead face childish behavior.

Most adults refuse to put up with a child misbehaving and go into “corrective mode”.  Many of you are making the mistake of trying to correct wrong behavior with certain adults in your life. You may hold the right formula for correcting a child but you won’t find the same solution using it on an adult. You can’t ground an adult, take away their keys, withhold allowance, kick them out of the house, or send them to bed early. You can’t force them to mind their manners, speak kind , clean words, or treat you the way God intended us to treat each other. What you can do, is recognize childish behavior and not give weight to it… This means if the adults in your life are mean to you, selfish or fit throwers, they may not have reached full maturity and may not be equal to you. They may look like an adult but if they act like a child then they are not your equal which means you don’t give their words or actions the same amount of weight you would give your equal.

You may find yourself in a relationship  with someone who holds the physical maturity but lacks the spiritual maturity. If you are expecting them to offer you mental maturity then you must understand, people can’t offer what they don’t hold. (This is not to say that people who are not spiritually mature are not mentally mature. That is not what I’m saying. I’m saying if you are spiritually mature and the person you are in a relationship with is not,  then you both are speaking different languages. One speaks the world while the other speaks the fruit of the spirit.  (Galatians 5:22  love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness , goodness, faith and meekness)

This automatically makes you unequal. One will expect to be independent, self seeking, self sufficient,  lacking intimacy or closeness,  oblivious to the needs of the other ; simply because they  don’t understand what the true definition of love is.  While the other continues to offer gentleness, love, compassion, understanding, teamwork, involvement, unity, nurturing, faithfulness and is rejected at every turn.  They keep coming back in love repeatedly;  speaking the language they know best, which is long suffering.  Yet, they keep being turned away because the language they speak is  foreign to the person they are in a relationship with.  We have many marriages dissolve over misunderstandings such as what I just described.  Both expect to be treated as an equal even though they are not. Many friendships have ended over hurt feelings or feeling rejected by someone who was meant to be different than anyone else .  People tend to treat each other as equals before doing the math and realizing the equation doesn’t add up properly.

If you are treating the adults in your life as equals and expecting them to treat you as you have treated them; then you may be in a relationship with someone who is not your equal which disqualifies you,  from the right to get upset.   What?!*#  ( We don’t get upset at a child for doing wrong , because we all know a child doesn’t know , what they don’t know; simply because they haven’t reached full maturity.  Some adults don’t know , what they don’t know yet either;  because they haven’t reached full maturity in all the areas we claim to have reached full maturity.  )

Sometimes those fighting for rightness in a wrong situation look just as immature as the one they are accusing of being immature.

Blessings,

Robin Worgull