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" As the child grows up, he realizes that everyone around him suffers from flaws, and he is often greatly disappointed (there’s that word again) by the discovery. If he never matures further, he goes through life feeling frustrated and let down that friends, family, and public figures do not live up to who and what he believes they should be to him. If he does mature, he comes to realize that other people’s flaws are often inextricably connected to virtues — that each represents different sides of the very same coin. The same energy that causes someone to be flaky, flighty, moody, or demanding, may also be what respectively makes them creative, adventurous, empathetic, or high-achieving. The mature come to realize that you can’t pick up one end of the stick of a person’s personality, without picking up the other — that what you most dislike about someone is frequently tied to what you most love. One can even come to exercise patience with those flaws in another which aren’t even connected to his or her virtues. As C.S. Lewis writes, the mature come to realize that it’s possible to love someone who’s damaged, since that’s exactly how you love yourself: “I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions but not hate the bad man . . . I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. "
― Brett McKay , The 33 Marks of Maturity
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" In a world where the faucet of every commodity — food, entertainment, shopping, media, sex — runs 24/7 on full blast, and one can be constantly satiated, if not completely oversaturated, on every possible pleasure, the mature individual intentionally chooses to abstain from certain things, at certain times; he deliberately cultivates a hunger (physical, psychological, or both), a sense of anticipation, that will ultimately heighten, and in some cases even sacralize, the satisfaction and delights of their consummation. He intentionally creates contrast between empty and full, having and having not, so that his life is not one undeviating, unbroken, benumbing stream of stuffed-full sameness, but rather has texture, seasons, expectancy. "
― Brett McKay , The 33 Marks of Maturity
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" Sharp of tongue, deft in debate, and unafraid of conflict, challenging the status quo, or causing offense, Jesus was anything but safe and predictable. Far from hiding in private solitude, and playing it small, Jesus was a public figure, a revolutionary who rigorously confronted the establishment, and who preached such a confrontational and audacious message that he was ultimately killed for it. "
― Brett McKay , Muscular Christianity: The Relationship Between Men and Faith
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" Recognizes the Wisdom of Fundamental Truths “All the necessary truths have been spoken. Many of them, in fact are part of our daily speech; are said with reverence in our moments of worship; are, on great occasions, delivered as axioms of wisdom. Why have they been so relatively powerless to shape our daily behavior?” —The Mature Mind Overstreet helpfully reiterates the above question this way: “since we have long known the most inspired truths about human behavior and human relationships, why have we failed to put those truths into action?” Why is it that “A number of saving insights have been brought into the world without any of them saving the world”? The answer to this line of inquiry, he says, is that “a mature truth told to immature minds ceases, in those minds, to be that same mature truth. Immature minds take from it only what immature minds can assimilate.” Most of us have had the experience where the wisdom of a timeless aphorism or principle that we heard, and ignored, as a child is suddenly revealed. To the immature, these “ah-ha” moments come more slowly, if at all. They spend their time looking for completely novel answers or pathways, feeling that timeworn truths are too simple and too common to hold much value. Or they acknowledge the existence of such truths, but believe they themselves are exceptions to the rules, and thus fruitlessly seek to circumvent them. The mature recognize fundamental truths, respecting the fact that they, too, are subject to the unchanging laws that structure reality, even as they seek to do something wildly original. "
― Brett McKay , The 33 Marks of Maturity
