keeping desire

Growing up is always something other people do. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. Being an adult has been a distant prospect. The world was going to look like a different place, of course. People were going to look different. I was going to feel different.

Maturity was a thing to be sought and desired, but “being an adult” was associated with that horrible scene in The Last Battle when Susan had lost her appetite for childish games and begun to love makeup and boys and fashion. The most awful thing wasn’t that she wouldn’t be allowed back, for that was true of Peter too, but that she didn’t want to come back. She had lost all desire for grand story—for the presence of Aslan Himself. In the end, all were reunited, no matter how grownup, but the loss of love was irreparable.

That scene—perhaps all of those Chronicles—hit on one of the biggest divides I’ve come to recognize in this whole strange epic of “growing up.” Perhaps more than most, I was given clear boundaries as a child—lines outside of which I could not step, decisions which were simply not mine to make. The consequences were clear, as was the reward for obedience. Not that me and the law were always cozy pals, as a certain well-worn leather strap can attest (from its new home in my hopechest, where it awaits those six boys my mother says I deserve). But no matter how my heart rebelled, it never doubted that the law was always a thing to hold in reverence, that authority was real, and that disobedience destroyed that which I loved most.

And therein was the key to it all. I was not raised by legalists, and I was not raised to be a legalist—any more than every human being is already hardwired for law. I was raised to know that relationship with my Father was the source of all good things, and that one could either choose the sorrow of breaking that relationship or pursue the fruit that came from running in the way of His commandments.

The lifting of parental sanctions has happened rather imperceptibly since those days. Some rules are less important to me than they were at five, and that’s okay (I only wear shoes when absolutely necessary and I go outside without sunhats now). Many reasons behind the rules have become more clear to me now than they were to my five-year-old self who wanted to wear ten headbands at once and dress like I was colorblind.

Of course I do not mean to imply that my heart is any less prone to sin than when I locked the babysitter outside, but amid all the changes that have come and are still coming, the implications of a divide between right and wrong has become more evident in my own heart, and in the lives of those around me.

Slowly, the realization has begun to dawn that becoming an adult means living with yourself and others in all the ways children are supposed to, but with more at stake. Honesty about my sin and perseverance in hard situations bring blessing no less than when I was five, but I no longer have the discipline of my parents to remind me of the alternative. All of a sudden, selfishness and pride and envy are no longer smoothed over, but carry real implications for lifelong relationships. Temptations still call, yet the fruit of succumbing is far deeper and far darker.

Many more roads lie open before me than they did when I was three, and part of growing up has been the awareness that I do indeed possess the power of choice which can and will alter my life. Yet identity changes everything, which means that “growing up” has far less to do with living or sinning in bigger ways than a child, and far more to do with striving for a wider vision of Christ than I possessed as a child. After all, obedience is simply an affirmation of a character I already possess, and to the degree that I continue to grow in grace, I will come into an ever fuller awareness of what this means.

Implications increase as the years progress, but my God is no less worthy of my time and energy, and will be nothing less than the object of my highest affections. I have no doubt that the world, my flesh, and the devil will continue to conspire till my last breath to separate me from my Lord. This will sometimes appear as a frontal attack, and at others times as a subtle drawing of my gaze away from reality in Christ. Life on this earth till we reach our homeland is perpetual engagement in warfare and constant longing for a homeland.

But one thing truly matters, as both David and Martha discovered:

One thing will I seek,

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord,

to behold the beauty of the Lord

and to inquire in His temple.