From Charley Wingate
Growing up and out
My good friend in real life’s childhood and adolescence and mine have some points in common:

I did not know adulthood myself as loss, but as gain.

He refutes the common secular claim that to grow up is to chuck out religion:

What first strikes me about this is how very much it is not about growth, but about loss.

Mark Lilla writes:

But one of the dirty little secrets about adolescence is that the young fear the very freedom they crave. They intuit the burden of autonomy and want, quite literally, to be "saved" from it. That is no doubt why, as researchers tell us, the average age of conversion is in the early teens.

That’s not pathological; it’s reality and humility if rightly understood. Being accountable to something bigger and better than you — objective truth, reality, God — is the true order of things and realising that is what of ‘growing up’ is about. Far from being oppressive — being under our own fallen human nature, our little egos and ids is just that — it’s empowering (sorry for the modern cant but it fits here) and liberating!

I can say from my growing up that when I tried to emulate the secular world’s unbelief (or rather belief against God) — briefly, over a decade ago — it made my handicaps worse not better.

I dare say it works that way for abler people as well.

From what little of it I’ve seen the world’s great religious literature seems to agree.