I was thinking about maturity and grace the other day, and it reminded me of this post from Jan 2008. I'm not the kind of person who likes to come to conclusions. I don't like to be patronizing. But, with that in mind, here are the conclusions I came to:

Grace isn't about not falling. Grace isn't about never wobbling, nor is it about never losing balance. Grace is about what you do as you lose balance, what you do you wobble, and, most of all, what you do as you fall. By this definition, a person can never fall from grace, they can only be given opportunities to exhibit it. No matter how far a person has fallen, no matter how fast or how painfully, the act of falling itself holds a seed of grace.

By the same token, maturity isn't about not making mistakes. It's about how you deal with the new situation. A person can make mistake after mistake. A person can make a million mistakes. No matter how many mistakes a person has made, no matter how destructive or painful the mistakes have been, they are still left with the decision of how to deal with the current situation. Every new situation holds the seed of maturity.

A flaw of these statements is that they assume free choice and free will, but our conscious choices are limited by our perspectives. They imply that to act with grace, or to act with maturity, is a choice, which reflexively can be taken to mean that to act without grace or to act immaturely is a choice.

"That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger" is bullshit. Every new experience, whether painful or not, holds the seed of new perspective. The more diverse the experience, the more diverse the perspective. Painful experiences can give us perspectives we never would have considered, but only strengthen us in as much as they diversify our perspectives. Sometimes things that don't kill us can cripple us, and sometimes painful experiences can destroy our capacity to recognize even newer perspectives.

My conclusion is that the seed of grace, and that the seed of maturity, is always present, and that the germination of those seeds is built on the choices a person makes. Sometimes, before a person can choose grace, they must choose to work towards giving themselves the option of grace. Grace and maturity are predicated on the capacity to change behavior, and the potential for them is never lost so long as there is a capacity for change. It's all a matter of having perspectives that allow for change.

If perspectives are built from experiences, then the capacity for having perspectives that allow for change is never lost until the capacity for having new experiences is lost.