Becoming a Mature Christian

Introduction:

My nephew gave me a book for Christmas, Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown.  She is a social worker who has studied emotions and popularized her research to help people develop healthy connections with others.  In her introduction she shared research that indicated that many people could only identify three emotions, happy, sad and angry.  Her book is a series of definitions, explanations or explorations (to use her geographic metaphor) of 87 emotions and experiences.  Her intent is to help people have the language to express their feelings and thus understand them.  I was taken aback at how so many people can lack basic self-awareness such that a book like this one is not only necessary but popular.  When the Bible speaks of becoming perfect or mature, I think it is speaking of having developed self-awareness and the ability to connect with others.  In biblical terms we have learned how to ‘love one another’.  Now we have social workers and research to help us but people used to rely on the stories in the Bible and the teachings of our faith to reach this level of maturity.  I wonder if we might learn something about making meaningful connections from a fresh look at the stories of Jesus through the lens of developing emotional maturity.   For the next few weeks, I am going to examine the stories of Jesus’ encounters with people as recorded in the gospel of Luke.  Maybe they learned something about themselves from him and maybe we can too.