I'm forever a child.

A few weeks back I was over at a friends house smoking cigars and drinking wine (I wasn't drinking wine 'cause of my water pledge - anyway), we smoked big cigars and drank red wine from wine glasses.  We sometimes touched on "grown up" topics such as philosophy and literature ... but it all came back to us trying to make the smoke coming out our mouths look like the way Snoop Dogg does it.  We were children, playing adults.

And I feel like this so often; people seem to grow into the things you just grow into because it's a part of being an "adult".  We memorise quotes of great writers, philosophers and theologians.  We eat exotic foods with exotic names.  We drink drinks that make our faces twist - and pretend to enjoy it until we start to - and call it and "acquired taste".

I have come to believe that "being an adult" is a myth; there are only children pretending to be adults.   I am now 18, I can now do most things condoned by New Zealand law, but all though I truly enjoy a good coffee and beer, they are tastes I have acquired while attempting to seem grown up.

I struggle to see a "right of passage" into adulthood in Western culture.  In other cultures you simply turn 13, or kill an animal with your bare hands.  Some say in Western culture, things like occupation is a right of passage into adulthood; I'm a cafe manager, and to a certain degree a "social worker".  You'd think of these as occupations a grown up would have - but still, as I tell people that I'm "a cafe manager" or a "youth worker" something inside me giggles because I know deep down, I'm just a big kid.

Another Western right of passage is moving out of home.  I move out to my first flat next Friday.  Maybe it is then that I will make my ontological change.  Or maybe, I will forever be a child, pretending to be an adult.

Losing sight.

Sometimes I lose sight of the vastness of God. I look to my own life and it feel like it's out of control - but really it's that I've put myself in control rather than God. I get caught up in what's going on around me and what's going on in my own life that I forget, really, I need to be denying myself, picking up my cross and following Jesus.

It's like the stars are God and the city lights are what's going on in and around me; and through the light pollution I can't see God and what he is trying to tell me, or change in me. Because really, if we aren't letting God constantly mould and change us, what are we really doing as Christians? We should be letting God call us outside of our comfort zones. We should be placing our insecurities, our brokenhearts, our addictions, our relationships, all in God. We often place these things, and everything else, in ourselves and it consumes us.

I lose sight that he created me - and he knows the pain that I go through. I lose sight of the fact that, through Jesus the curtain in the Tabernacle was torn and now, instead of residing there, he resides here, in me. I lose sight that God is a compassionate God that heals, phsically, spiritually and emotionally.

I lose sight of that fact that if I lack love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control I just need to lean more into the Holy Spirit who will bring these things out in me. (Notice: patience was in bold. Lord, Father, help me on this one, I need it).


I lose sight. A lot. Too much. Help me. Change me Lord.