The other day, I was reminded of an event from my childhood. For several years in a row Mr. Patterson was my Training Union teach (training union is an old Baptist thing, probably doesn't exist any more). Mr. Patterson tried to teach a group of boys age 10 or so a little bit about the Bible and how it fits into life.
The problem was that this group of boys was a little rambunctious. And no one wanted to take over. So each year as we got older, Mr. Patterson moved up with us. He was probably the only one who could manage us.
At the end of each year, Mr. Patterson held a party at his house. He had a pool in the back yard and we'd swim, eat burgers and do what boys do - make a lot of noise. Mr. Patterson filmed all of this on his trusty 8mm home camera (with no sound). Of course, this film had to be developed (no VCR's back then), so we couldn't watch it immediately, but we could watch the film from the previous year.
My single recollection of these films is remembering how silly (immature) we seemed the year before. "Man," we thought, "look at the ridiculous things we did last year." Of course we still did those things and the next year was exactly the same.
I recalled all of this when I heard a young adult talking about how immature a teenager seemed. "Man," they thought, "look at the ridiculous things they do. We used to do that." Pretty much the same attitude I had back when I was a kid.
As they said this, I thought how immature this young adult was and how they had so much to learn. Then it occurred to me, how immature am I now? My mother probably realizes that in 20 or 30 more years, I'm going to understand so much more about life.
I'm not sure any of us can see our own immaturity. I've decided that I'm going to (try to) stop pointing out this in others, they'll grown into their situation and in a few years think "Man, look at the ridiculous things we did last year."
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