Struggling with Maturity

One hot summer afternoon in Iraq I was walking with my best friend from the neighborhood; we were both in our early teens. He told me that he wants to be a doctor. I thought it was kind of an unrealistic goal since he wasn’t a straight A student so I asked him why he wanted to be a doctor. He told me that his dad was motivating him to finish school and to do his best. I knew my friend’s dad worked long hours, from early morning until afternoon, as construction worker then worked as a taxi driver until late evening or night. Then he continued telling me that when his dad was a teenager his grandparents never told his dad to finish school so his dad doesn’t want the same thing to happen to him. I remember making a mental note to the like, “You have to change; you can’t make your loved ones go through the same thing you went through.”

The theme of this writing is ‘maturity’, so I will give you a bit of background about myself so you understand why I struggled with being mature. Both my dad’s and mom’s families have common traits: they are extremely passive and unmotivated; they have no dreams and pursue no meaningful goals; they don’t live up to the expectations of their roles as men, providers, protectors, husbands and fathers; they have low self-image and self-esteem; their thinking goes along the line, “My dad didn’t leave anything for me, why should I leave anything for my children?” So naturally I got their genes, and I too had those traits but few things happened in my life that changed me, and that’s what I am going to talk about here.

The biggest two things happened to me were: one, I was never close to my family (I was never close to my uncles, cousins, and I don’t have older brothers) and I hadn’t seen my dad for the majority of my life so they had no big influence on me; two, because I had no men I considered heroes as a teenager I looked to the Bible for my heroes such as Joseph, David, Daniel, Job, Paul and of course our Lord Jesus Christ. Then in 2000 (I think) after being in Canada for a year I was watching TV and this older man who was well dressed and spoken and preaching God’s Word in a practical manner like no one else so he got my attention. Next week I found out his name is Dr. Charles Stanley and one of my uncle’s was visiting while I was listening to Dr. Stanley. My uncle asked me sarcastically, “You listen to those guys?” Meaning, it is stupid to listen to Christians. I looked at my uncle, who had been in Canada for decades and had done nothing of value with his life, then I looked back at Dr. Charles Stanley and I thought to myself, “You better keep watching this man if you don’t want to end up like your uncle!”

Maturity by Fadi

In 2003 I went to work in a warehouse full time and one of my best co-workers was a Canadian man in his 50s who wasn’t spiritually wise by any means: spend all his money and time on beer and cigarettes. But he had different kind of wisdom and maturity: he knew when to speak and when not, when to get involved in a matter and when not, when to offer advice and when not, when to focus on his work and when to help others. I worked with him 4 years and I learned a lot from him because I hadn’t observed that type of maturity in any member of my family.

Then in 2007 I started university and man was it a different atmosphere! While I was surrounded by losers all my life suddenly I was surrounded by intellectuals who were actually quite humble! It is funny how losers quite often feel the need to justify their messed up lives with unjustified prideful claims; while intellectuals have no such need. So I changed: I started to dream and dream big! I started making personal plans and meeting deadlines I had set for myself. The fear of dreaming, planning and having a purpose slowly faded away. All my life I was scared if I dreamt that I was disobeying God. If I had a purpose I was defying God’s purpose. If I planned God would destroy my plans. Then I learned how to dream, have a purpose and plans while still recognizing that God is in control and His purpose and plans come first. Actually, it takes more obedience to plan and surrender your plan to God than not have any plan.

But the biggest blow to the old passive Fadi came in 2008 when my dad came to Canada. I was shocked by how passive, unmotivated and reliant on others he is. He has no worthy to mention dreams and worked toward no goals. He is not living but simply existing—I think his only goal in life is not to die physically. (Don’t get me wrong, he is not a bad person.) As I got to observe my dad I started to understand what my mom meant all those years by telling me in frustration, “You are so much like your dad!” What really motivated me to further change is seeing how unhappy my mom is with him. I didn’t want my future wife to feel the same way. Because I never knew him I started asking her about him and I found out that he has been like this ever since they got married—he simply didn’t have big dreams or goals and never improved himself. So I subconsciously started making those mental notes to myself and started changing myself slowly. I realized that I was passive because it is in my family and I have to do something about it—I have to change.

A lot of those changes happened to me subconsciously meaning I didn’t sit down and write on paper that’s what I am going to change about myself and then went about it. No, I just started changing. Suddenly I found myself not wearing baseball caps anymore–I thought to myself, “So what I have Trichotillomania? If people don’t like it that’s their problem. I have no problem with it.” I started dressing up, you know, dress shirts, dress pants, and dress shoes because I knew I was going to graduate one day and I had to get ready to present myself as an engineer in the work place. I became outspoken and confident. I believed in myself. I started doing things for myself while before I always had to find a reason other than myself (usually something or someone I considered more important than myself) to dedicate my work to. I now have no problem with speaking in front of a crowd such as presentations (one of the reasons I was so scared to go to university was presentation in front of a class! I remember being scared to death in high school of presentations.) I started defending my rights, and I let others know that I won’t just let them take what’s rightly mine. I remember reading some of my old writings, here on flickr, and thinking to myself, “I wrote this, why?!” Because I don’t have the same self-image and self-esteem issues I used to have just few years ago. And because I started believing in myself I also started trusting others…I realized wanting to have fun is not the same as being sinful. I used to like routine predictable life but now I want to go out and just have fun, and do spontaneous things. Before I used to ask why, “Why would my future wife love me?”, “Why would this good thing happen to me?”, “Why would I succeed?” But now I ask myself, “Why not!” My classmates who don’t feel comfortable with dressing up ask me, “Why are you dressed up?” And I answer, “Why not?”

I didn’t know what was going on. I felt strange for roughly 2 years, 2008-2010. I wondered why I was acting different than the Fadi I knew. I looked in the mirror and I didn’t know the person I was looking at. I felt confused and lost. I thought to myself that it was ok, that it was just a phase I was going through, and the old me will come back and everything will be fine. Not that I didn’t like the new me, I just didn’t know the new me and I missed the old Fadi—the idealist Fadi who lived in his dream land that didn’t work in the real world. I kept praying in early 2010 asking God to explain to me why I was different than I know myself, to show me what’s going on.

Then in May of 2010 I had a job interview. The interviewer, a senior mechanical engineer, found out that I had delayed my education 4 years and I told him why. He told me that his career was delayed 4 years too because when he graduated Canada was going through a recession and he couldn’t find a job until 4 years later. Then he said, “My career was delayed 4 years because of the recession, yours was delay 4 years because you had to mature-up.” And I thought to myself, “Aha! That’s what’s happening to me: I matured!” It was such a relief when I figured out what was happening. I realized that’s the new me and that’s how I will be for a long time, and that the old Fadi was a phase that had passed away not the new Fadi. I stopped struggling with the new me and accepted me! Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in obedience, and waiting upon God, and loving unconditionally, giving, forgiving, and being faithful and trustworthy…but that doesn’t mean while I am waiting on God about a certain issue that I would put the rest of my life on hold.

I spent many months after that thinking about ‘maturity’ because I had never in my life gave it a thought. Nobody told me about it, I never read about, and few people I knew personally had it. The closest I’ve come to maturity is in Dr. Stanley’s sermons about spiritual maturity which is usually taught as spiritual discernment and wisdom. But maturity is different. Maturity has to do with a person taking responsibility of his roles in life and measuring up to high expectations he has set for himself. While wisdom tells you what steps to take to reach a goal, maturity determines your goals and how to carry yourself while you attempt to reach your goal.

So why did I tell you about me and my family? Do I enjoy telling others that my family is this and that? No. Do I hate my family? Absolutely not. The purpose of this writing is this: we are all born with a half full envelope, this enveloped is half filled with things we inherit from our parents–some are desired things while others are not; some will stay permanently there while others don’t have to—but it is up to us to fill up the other half, and if we work hard we can even take some of the undesired things we inherited from our parents and replace them with good things of our choice. Whatever you do in life don’t make the biggest mistake: staying the same—never changing. The Bible says we were all born sinners. Do you know what that means? If you stay the same you will stay a sinner separated from God here on earth and eternally. Mature up my friend, it is better late than never.

I often wonder how much my immaturity cost me. And I often wonder how God used my immaturity to protect me. I will probably never know, but I am glad He eventually did His work and matured me up. My mom nowadays asks me, “How come you think differently than your dad?”