Growing Pains and Unresolved Business

Recently, I've been thinking about life, and I have concluded that life as an adult is tough. I'm not saying that there is no joy and happiness at all, but there will be struggle, pain and uncertainty at different points in time. Being an adult is a lot harder than being a child or a teenager, and I do feel the pain of growing up (literally and spiritually).

As a child or teenager, you don't have to think much about the future. You just do as you please and your parents (or caregivers) plan the next few years of your life for you. Maybe a child or teenager has much less autonomy than an adult, but it's not like I cared that much about autonomy when I was a child or teenager anyway. My parents did give me sufficient freedom and I was happy with that. If I could stay as a child, and never grow up, it may not be such a bad thing. But as an adult now, one has to start planning. They say that we should live as if today will be our last but plan for the rest our lives to serve God. There is need to plan to save money, plan roughly what I'll be doing for the next few years, think about how what I'm doing now will affect the next few years, prioritize my commitments and responsibilities, make sure I don't burn out along the way. So many considerations! I wouldn't say that the process is not enjoyable at all, but I feel stretched to grow.

In addition, I feel the seemingly conflicting message from Scripture to be a steward of everything I have yet to trust God with everything that I have. On one hand, you want to plan and work hard in all you do but on the other, you trust in God's plans for you. Maybe it's tough because I work and plan for the wrong motivations at times. So for me, the greater challenge is to trust God with all that I have: the past, the present and the future. Believe me, I face the difficulty of trusting God each day when I pray about my concerns and worries about my life. I always pray that I will feel secure in my relationship with Him and that I will trust Him even though there is no resolution of the problems I have yet. Then of course, the lesser challenge is to know how to be a good steward of what I've been entrusted with.

As an adult, one is expected to be more responsible with what we do and what we say. Well, it certainly is not a bad thing to be responsible, but I do feel the social pressure to act and speak in certain more socially acceptable ways, especially in more "adult" settings. For instance, I will feel conscious of myself when I act or speak in a more child-like and silly manner, or when I don't really think before I speak and I just speak my mind. It's a constant challenge to speak and act in love for the other person, especially when the other person is so unlike you. I hope I am not the only person feeling this. As a child or teenager, most of your friends act and speak in similar ways, so it's easy to interact with them and be yourself. But as an adult, this somehow has changed because there's a bigger world out there that one has been placed in. You can't just "be yourself" anymore because there are others to take into consideration. It is the struggle and challenge of putting others first and yet be comfortable with who you are. 

And of course, as I negotiate myself in life, there's the unresolved issues of the past that will affect who I am as a person and the choices that I make. I still feel the pain and hurt of the past. I shall not mention what it is here as it is too personal. But, perhaps, just perhaps, I would want to seek counsel and/or read books with regard to these issues because they're just too deep and I feel quite stuck. To some extent, I've been coping better with them, but I still feel that they've not been dealt with sufficiently, because I still feel broken.

Perhaps one of the greatest blessings of being a Christian, is to know that I am a child of God, regardless of my ability to plan for the future yet trust God for it, my ability to be responsible and my unresolved issues. It's a relationship that's entirely given by grace and not based who I am or what I do. I can always be a child in God's eyes. :)

Furthermore, it brings me comfort to know (even though I may not feel this way all the time), that in uncertainty, God holds my future in His hands and works for my good, as any normal and capable parent would want the best for his/her child. In pain, God provides comfort through His Word and through the church family. In struggles, God promises to walk alongside me, and to give grace each step of the way to start living as I was meant to live.