By Todd Paetznick, July 11, 2024

What were your expectations for your life when you were young?    

God does not change, but people were created to change and adapt to change.  We are all born barely capable of anything other than eating and surviving.  As we age, we discover what we can do and how we might manipulate the world around us.  Along the way, we develop expectations and goals for our future. Interestingly, our visions of the future rarely consider any significant changes.  We are often blind to the possibility that anything will differ significantly from what we know and have experienced.  We expect the world to be predictable and our plans to fit neatly along a projected timeline or inside a spreadsheet model we develop.  In reality, however, life is unpredictable, and change is constant.  To flourish across all the years of our lives, we must prioritize adaptation as a key skill to develop.  

As children, our physical, cognitive, and spiritual development are measured against expectations for what is typical for a person of our age regarding height, weight, motor function development, reading skills, and many other metrics.  Measurements act as guides to reveal developmental areas that may need additional attention.  As we grow older, we do not stop comparing ourselves to others.  In business, measuring activities is often used as a management tool.  The adage, “What gets measured, gets done,” is often heard in business circles.  Notice that all our measurements have some standard for comparison and a target representing what is considered ideal.  However, businesses have also discovered that care must be taken to measure the right activities.  Measuring the wrong things can result in undesirable outcomes. 

Covetousness is a fancy Bible term for the sin of desiring something that does not belong to us. Coveting compares what we have to another person’s significant other, job, car, house, and lifestyle, intending to take what does not belong to us.  The sin of coveting exists only in our heads and does not have to play out in the act of taking.  Wanting what belongs to someone else is morally wrong.  We must avoid the sin trap of comparing what we have with others.   

However, measurements can be useful, especially when they are proactive diagnostics. Babies that do not thrive are tragic. Early identification of a problem can lead to corrective remedies.  Other measures mark the milestones and stages of our lives.  People are expected to eat meat by a certain age rather than subsisting on milk, for example.  The writers of the Bible, under God’s inspiration, were well aware of the developmental expectations for physical and spiritual life.  Hebrews notes the tragedy of the failure to thrive and develop in Christian discipleship.

“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the actual words of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes [only] of milk is unacquainted with the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to distinguish between good and evil” (Hebrews 5:12-14 NASB20).

According to the writer, the ability to distinguish between good and evil is the mark of spiritual maturity.  (Interestingly, Adam and Eve sought knowledge of good and evil by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.) The way the Hebrews passage is phrased, there may be a difference between experientially knowing good and evil and being able to tell the difference between them.  The latter ability requires development through familiarizing oneself with biblical teachings, “the word of righteousness.”    

Flourishing in our lives and careers does not happen automatically; it requires effort.  Think of our lives as a line, with one end representing our birth and the other our death.  The line represents the passage of time.  We can assign points along our lifeline to represent three major segments of our lives: childhood, adulthood, and elderhood.  Over the next few weeks, we will explore in greater detail what needs to happen during each segment of our lives so that we flourish across all of our lives.