I was brushing my teeth the other day and realized that about half of my teeth are made of metal. That is because when I was young, I didn't brush my teeth. So half of my real teeth have been replaced with metal crowns. I've got so much metal in my teeth that when I go for my check-ups, they don't check for cavities; they check for rust.
But I was thinking about when I was a kid, and I would trick my mom into thinking I had brushed my teeth by rubbing my front teeth with my washcloth. When she checked my teeth, she just said, "Smile"; she never really checked my back teeth. I don't really know what I had against brushing my teeth. Maybe it was that, in a family with 4 kids and two adults sharing one bathroom, the toothpaste lid was often left off the tube, and the first quarter inch was hard like a rock. That grossed me out.
My parents both had false teeth by the time they were 30. Dad claimed it was because of the lousy water he had to drink over seas during World War II. Mom just said she had soft teeth. But I remember they always said, “If you don’t brush your teeth, you’ll end up needing false teeth like us.” I looked at them and thought to myself, “Those look pretty good to me.” I guess I just didn’t believe that brushing your teeth was a big deal. Now the only teeth I have left without metal are the front ones that I rubbed with a washcloth every day.
These days, they don’t hand out false teeth as they used to. They are more likely to do a root canal and put a metal cap on what’s left of the tooth. Or if it's really bad they might pull the tooth and insert a dental implant, which is basically screwing in a new tooth. So instead of just torturing you once, pulling all of your teeth at once, and getting it over with, you might have to go in several times to get all your teeth taken care of. If you’re a dentist, I’m sorry, but I hate going to the dentist. I had one once who said, “Do you want laughing gas, Novocain, or head phones with music?” I said, “I want every thing you’ve got. In fact, if you want to put me to sleep and wake me when it’s over, that would be okay too.” And that was just for the check-up.
Anyway, I was remembering the bad brushing habits I had as a kid, and I said to myself, "I wish I knew then what I know now." How often do you say that to yourself? I say it quite a bit actually. Somebody once said, "Youth is wasted on the young." I’m pretty sure that if I had it to do over again, I would do quite a few things differently. For one thing, I’d do a better job of brushing my teeth. Yup, I sure wish I knew then what I know now.
But then my mind started meandering. I was thinking that I’m really kind of a child in God’s eyes. There are a lot of things God knows that I don’t know. I hope I don’t grow up spiritually and some day say, “I wish I could do it all over again.” "I wish I knew then what I know now." I wonder if I could figure out what mistakes I’m making now. I’d kind of like to be able to know now what I will say I wish I knew when I become a spiritual adult.
So I started going through the Bible to see what it said about growing up spiritually and what it means for us now. Probably the best-known passage about growing up is the part in the “Love Chapter”, First Corinthians 13, verses 9-13. In there, it says, “For now we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. At present we see indistinctly as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”.
In the days when that was written, “mirrors” were not the perfect reflection that we have today. They were more like seeing your reflection in a window or pool of water. In other words, the reflection was quite a bit different from reality. So Paul was saying that at present, we see a distorted version of reality; so the best thing to do is love others. What I get from all of that is that I can brush my teeth, wash my face, comb my hair, and dress up all I want, but if I don’t love people, I’m still going to fall short of what God wants me to be.
The good news is that God loves me anyway.
What are your thoughts? How does one grow spiritually? What do you consider to be indications of spiritual maturity? If you had your life to live over what are some things you might do differently?