glory in souls

I think the mark of spiritual maturity isn’t that you have a safe life where you follow all the rules and look respectable and have a clean house and don’t cuss.  I think the mark of spiritual maturity should be looked for in the soul, because it starts in the soul.  Of course, it comes out in how you live. It should. That’s one of its proofs.  But we are foolish if we believe that because someone is clean on the outside, that they are alive on the inside.  It is easy to pretend on the outside. It is impossible to fake a dead soul.  

I think the mark of spiritual maturity is how much your soul yearns for God, and what it does with that yearning. I think spiritual maturity is how you talk to the God who made the Big Dipper and the inchworm and your one of a kind face.  I think spiritual maturity is measured in your relationship with the one who couldn’t just let you die without hope, who chose to bear everything on your sake, who forsook glory so He could awaken your soul.

Spiritual maturity isn’t about what you don’t do or the rules you keep or the verses you have memorized or the tv shows you don’t watch or the car you drive or your bank book or the hymns you sing.  Spiritual maturity usually involves some throwing out of the book, because it isn’t sufficient.  A soul who has been captivated by a God big enough to create a universe and loving enough to redeem it will not simply be ‘clean and orderly.’   That soul will overflow with glory.  Even if life sucks.  Even if sorrow and despair and sin and darkness characterizes its situation more than spiritual ‘cleanliness’.  

The soul who has been given glory will keep rambling on.  That soul will not be simple.  Life isn’t simple.  Even the cleanest of circumstances is still messy, because our souls are dark and complex and afraid and longing.  But for the soul that is known by God, there will be a glory big enough to overcome the pits.  There will be a rope that it clings on to even when the glory seems to fade into cracked lips and cracking relationships and cracking hearts.

Because that soul, that spiritually mature soul, it knows that glory does not die.
God will not be overcome, and neither will His children. 

Souls that overflow with glory, that spill it out in big ways and little, that eek with the beauty and depth and love that comes from the source of glory, those souls are spiritually mature.  And they are beautiful, despite their pain. Maybe even because of it.  God makes vessels of glory out of earthen pots.  And he likes to shine through their cracks.