It's time to grow up, just a little

Another e-mail joke, detailing the differences between generations, is making its way through cyber-space, addressed primarily to people who have seen their 40th birthday. Since I passed the 40 year mile marker along the road of life long ago, I could easily relate to the comparisons.

Car seats and Cartoon Network didn't exist. Living in the suburbs of Denver, we got the three major networks and one local station, when the TV worked. If we wanted to watch cartoons, Saturday morning was it. Otherwise, we were stuck with the nightly news, or reruns of Gilligan's Island on the local station if Dad wasn't home from work yet. The result? We were exposed to current events on a regular basis and sometimes would even discuss them as a family.

Homework was burdensome, in that if we needed to do research for a paper or a project, we'd best get it done during the school day. No Internet, and no easy access to the public library meant time management skills were paramount, as early as fifth grade. Mom and Dad invested in a good set of encyclopedias, but they, like a lot of technology today, were nearly obsolete as they came off the printing press.

In our house the phone was a tool, not a source of entertainment. We were tied to nearest phone jack and had strict time limits and time constraints. No calls during supper, no exceptions. The phone usually didn't ring at suppertime anyway, because everyone else was sitting down at the same time, but if it did, it went (gasp) unanswered. If the call was important, the caller would try again, waiting the requisite 15 minutes. Same thing with a busy signal. No call waiting meant if the line was tied up, you either missed the call or the caller kept trying. These restrictions required us to be concise in our conversations, saving extended conversations for the next face-to-face encounter.

Long-distance was prohibitively expensive. Letters, usually written long hand then entrusted to the U.S. Postal system, carried the day-to-day news. A long-distance call was an emergency and even then, timing was everything. If you had to call long-distance, you checked the clock on the wall, closely. The rate difference between regular business hours and evening hours was extreme.

Cell-phones were the purview of Dick Tracy or Maxwell Smart. If you went to the grocery store and couldn't remember if you were supposed to pick up cheddar or swiss cheese, you exercised your brain, hopefully coming up with the right answer.

In fact, decision making was almost always an independent, individual occurrence. Since there was no easy way to check with the other parent to OK a child's unexpected request, parents kept each other up-to-date on grounding status, grade point averages and phone calls from the school. This required daily face-to-face conversation between moms and dads.

A thin dime was sufficient pocket change for kids. Pay phones were everywhere so there was no excuse for not calling to say you'd be late or to beg for one more hour at the pool. If you spent your dime on a candy bar instead, you better get home, on time.

Decision-making was a daily experience from my earliest recollections. As latch-key children, we understood the parameters of acceptable behavior and though we were frequently grounded, we avoided trouble more often than not, considering the amount of temptation before us.

We carried that skill into our adult lives, where the stakes were, admittedly, much higher. But there is another side to the coin. After all, everyone was in the same boat, so a botched decision wasn't the end of the world.

Increasing responsibility to make decisions and accept the consequences of those decisions is a lengthy rite of passage that begins in childhood and continues through the tumultuous adolescent years. I fear that rite has become somewhat truncated in this day and age of instant messaging, email, Internet, cell phones and texting. Trust in anyone's decision-making skills extends only as far as a cell phone signal reaches. Emotions live close to the surface and instant messaging, social networking sites and email provide an instant outlet for a knee-jerk reaction that cannot be taken back. Since there is no impediment to instant communication, relationships have been torn asunder with a minimum number of keystrokes.

That, apparently, is not the only casualty of the techno takeover.

A friend's daughter, who has children just now coming of age, recently told her mom about a conversation she had with her peers. One of the other mothers shared information from an article that proposed that young men, between the ages of say 19 and 25 are anywhere from 4 to 6 years behind on their level of maturity than young men from preceding generations.

That's a frightening concept. But we shouldn't be surprised.

It happens step-by-step. When a step is missed, life will circle around, repeatedly, until the step is finally learned. It's called growing up, and we may be making harder than it needs to be, all in the name of instant this and instant that.

All of us, with me at the front of the line, have miles to go before we're done, before we're finally all "grown up."

The author of "Levels of Maturity," Jeannette Santino, MS, CNC, has identified six levels of maturity: Infant, Toddler, Child, Adolescent, Adult, Master, and Angelic or God-like.

Adults, she says, have learned -- among other things -- to live by the principle that they cannot harm others without somehow harming themselves, they accept personal responsibility and, if things don't go their way, they re-evaluate to see what they need to do differently.

She acknowledges that although some people reach the adult level of maturity fairly young, some people never do, in spite of advancing years.

A friend and brother in Christ, Jason Duncan, opines on his blog "Searching For More" that the same statement can be applied to some Christians today. He sees it as a lack of discipleship, where "we spend most of our time either evangelizing the lost or placating the saved. Because of this lack of attention to discipleship, the Church of Jesus has become a laughing stock to the world. We claim power. We claim authority. We claim we have truth. But our actions belie all of those claims. The world cannot tell most Christians from themselves."

Just as it happens in our natural human life, so it is with our new life in Christ. It too, happens step-by-step, and if we miss a step, the Lord will circle the step until we embrace it and are able move forward. Remember Israel's 40 year desert wanderings, recorded for us in God's Word, not to be emulated, but avoided.

"Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. Hebrews 5:13 (NIV)

Jeannette Santino, MS, CNC has a holistic health practice in Escondido, California, where she teaches clients self-empowering methods of stress reduction. Read the entire article at http://www.naturalhealthweb.com/articles/santino1.html

Read Jason's blog at http://www.searchingformore.com