Progress In Process

Twenty-one years seems like an awfully long time to become an adult. Full adult­hood is really closer to thirty-five. A per­son spends half a life­time get­ting into the game. That seems like a real waste. You don’t really catch what is going on until you are fifty. By the time you are sixty you have about fig­ured out the game of life and its cycles. When you hit sev­enty you can phi­los­o­phize about it. You finally mas­ter it and it is over. You die.

The rea­son that seems a lit­tle grim is that it is based on com­mon myths. One of those myths is that this is the one and only world — the myth that it all begins and ends on planet earth. Another myth is that of progress. Yes, you go through devel­op­men­tal stages. The lit­tle girl that makes mud pies even­tu­ally makes a Ger­man Choco­late Cake. Mod­ern and Post­mod­ern peo­ple are forward-looking at the expense of see­ing that per­fec­tion is at birth. Pure faith is dur­ing child­hood. Our purest essence is before we go out into the world.

“Unless you become like lit­tle chil­dren you will not enter the king­dom…” are the haunt­ing words of Jesus, spo­ken to adults that despised child­hood and wor­shipped adult spir­i­tual demise. We have the process back­wards. It is the inno­cence of the child, not the ways of the world that serve us best. Heaven is more the child inside than the man­sion in the sky. Devel­op­men­tal myths are tainted by our tech­no­logic world. We do not go from sim­ple to com­plex as much as we go from pure to cor­rupt. The body begins to turn on you about half-way through life. Ever notice that there just are not many sev­enty year old pro­fes­sional foot­ball play­ers still on the field?

The progress in process that lasts for­ever may just be the exact oppo­site of what you think is hap­pen­ing. It is no acci­dent that those liv­ing the longest seem to regress back to child­hood. The end is the begin­ning. The road between is a loop. Per­fec­tion is some­thing we have along. It appears to dis­ap­pear and then reap­pear. We live from trust to trust. Inde­pen­dence is the illu­sion between two states of helplessness.

Who you are right now, deep down inside, before you ever learned to read waits patiently while you learn some lessons from life. Don’t be sur­prised, after you die, that you sud­denly feel like a child again. The process in progress is really a progress in process. We are for­ever chil­dren loved by an eter­nal heav­enly parent.