Spiritual Hiccups - Spiritual Maturity

In today's readings, Psalm 147 calls us to praise the LORD.  And the Isaiah reading opens with, "I am the LORD, and there is no other."  I'll have to admit that I am often so preoccupied with figuring out the faith that I can find it difficult to pause in awe and wonder, to offer praise simply for its own sake.  And I worry sometimes that this is a sign of real spiritual immaturity on my part.  Or perhaps it's just a form of spiritual narcissism.

Small children tend to think that the world revolves around them.  This is largely a logical conclusion based on their parents' doting on them and responding to their every cry.  Of course as they grow older, as they mature, they gradually discover that this was an illusion.  The world is not all that focused on them.  The world keep spinning and one day moves to the next with little regard for them.

But we never fully mature, do we.  We still measure things by how they impact us.  As we get older and wiser, it is not our only measure.  In most of us, it is tempered by concern for how things impact others, but concerns about number one often still dominate.  Most of us don't take naturally to be self-sacrificial. 

For me, this focus on self often leads to anxiety and sometimes frustration.  Am I doing a good enough job?  Do people like and respect me?  If there is difficulty at the church, is it my fault?  What should I do differently? 

Pastors have long been accused of having Messiah complexes, and to the degree this is true, I suspect it comes from thinking that a congregation revolves around us.  We're indispensable.  The sun rises and sets on us.  The congregation succeeds or fails because of us.

"I am the LORD, and there is no other."  That is true whether or not I figure out and understand the most difficult theological doctrines.  God is always God, and I am, always and finally, one of God's creatures, a vessel fashioned by the potter.  No amount of wishing or hoping will make me a different vessel than the one I am, and there is actually something rather freeing in that acknowledgment.

I frequently repeat a favorite quote from the opening of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.  "Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves."  And I suppose that wisdom and maturity are not all that different.  True wisdom, true maturity, both frees me from my anxieties as well as freeing me to praise God.  I just wish I could mature a little faster.

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