I take myself with a grain of salt

I think back to who I was 10 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago, 1 month ago...and I think how grateful I am that God did what it took to change me from the self-absorbed, egotistical, legalistic, cold-hearted person I once was! But then, wait a minute...10 years from now, I'll be thinking how grateful I am that He changed me from who I am TODAY into who I will be THEN.

And so I remember again: I will never "arrive."

I will, at some point and by God's grace, be embarrassed of how selfish and wordly and utterly unChristlike I am today, thought I know in my heart I'm worlds away from where I once was. It occurs to me that today, though I feel more "holy" than I ever have in my life, I still have sin in me, apart from the sins that I know of, that I can't even understand or even contemplate now; but since one day, I will look back and be able to see my own lack of maturity at this current point in time, I trust that a lack of maturity is here in me now, abiding deep in my heart, mind, and soul, seemingly hidden and waiting for the fullness of time til the Holy Spirit will penetrate, uproot, and replant His beauty within.

I take myself with a grain of salt.

I may feel spiritually mature but my perspective is limited to my own existence. I felt mature 10 years ago and now I realize I was so far from it that it is laughable. I may be further along than I've ever been before but I'm a very weak and ineffective standard to be measuring myself against.

Perhaps a sign of true maturity in Christ is knowing that I, by myself, lack what is needed for life and godliness on my own--no matter how much knowledge, no matter the amount of volunteer hours logged, no matter how many Bible study books are lining the shelf--but that it is His divine power that grants me everything (1 Peter 1:3). I was incapable as an 18 year old to see the immaturity in myself and will myself to change on my own. I might have seen some "big" issues, but I had no idea of the depths to which God would change my heart and mind! I was blind. And it is impossible for a blind man to heal himself: he must have someone open his eyes. I think that is what maturity in Christ means: God opening your eyes to more fully see Him so that, in turn, you may more fully see yourself in Him. Praise Him that the scales continue to be, sometimes rather painfully, ripped from these feeble eyes!

I think of Eustace in "Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader." He was turned into a hideous dragon because of the arrogance of his heart. The only way to be turned into a boy again was to have his scaled scraped off by Aslan's claws. And when he was changed back into a boy, he was not the same boy he once was! He was a new creation, someone altogether different than he was before his painful, scale-ripping experience.

I pray that the people I knew 10 years ago give me grace now to believe I really have been changed. I'm not the same as I was 10 years ago, 1 year ago, 1 month ago, 1 day ago. I pray I give other people grace to believe people really can be changed; to not judge someone based on who they used to be, but by who they prove to be and, perhaps even more fully, by who God will one day make them to be.

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whome we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."
--C. S. Lewis, From The Weight of Glory.