NO DOUBT “maturity” is a matter of gaining knowledge and understanding. Surely maturity is, too, a matter of asking yourself what you are going to do with the knowledge and understanding you’ve gained. But maturity is also admitting to yourself that you will never learn enough and you will never understand enough to be completely convinced that what you have gained, nor what you do with it, are actually right. And, maturity is becoming convinced that regardless of all these things, you have the same two choices that everybody else has—to stand courageously with your best understanding of what God created you to be and do, or to spend the rest of your life tossed about by the endless waves of your concern over what other men think of you. In other words, maturity is finding the humble courage to be and do something in the name of God instead of being and doing everything in the name of your own pride and ego and fear—which is the same thing as never being or doing anything at all. Even if you don’t have a clue as to what you are doing, it is better to face God each day as a person who is honestly mistaken for the sake of what he truly believes is God’s Love, than as one who is absolutely guilty of caring only for his own vanity.

All of which is a long-winded way of echoing the secular wisdom of the ages, which says that we must be true to ourselves. The spiritual wisdom of the ages is not too different, qualifying the notion with the realization that to be true to yourself means to be true to who and what you are in the embrace of God’s Love, and that this has nothing to do with what the world tells you that you could be, should be, or already are.

IN A PHRASE, maturity is a matter of discovering, accepting, and living as the person God created you to be; regardless of what anybody else thinks of you.