Growing Up or Growing Old?

there are certain trials in our lives that we all, at one time or another, really don't want to walk through...it would be a much more pleasant experience if we could just go around them, wish them away or in fact never have to face them at all...
today i'm choosing to face one that i've put up on the shelf for a while - i'll let you know later how it goes...this all was instigated by the way at church today...our pastor was talking about the epidemic in american christianity for people to "grow old" in church while never "growing up" in Christ...he coined it as Persistant Infancy Syndrome...
we all know them, people that got saved 20 years ago but have never made it past the new members class, have never discipled, much less ever witnessed to another human being, but yet faithfully attended every service...somehow all along thinking that their very prescence over the years maturity would come...i think at some point in all our lives we could say guilty, but I personally don't do stagnant very well...
the big question though that got me really thinking was this - he challenged us to look back to where we were spiritually just a year ago - and really reflect on have we grown? What about 10 years ago, what about to the day you truly committed your heart and life to Jesus? (in my case that was December of 1983...)
my own answer was a little disheartening - in some areas i can say i have grown and in others i can say i have personally avoided growing in for the mere mortal fact of pain...no one likes pain, but healing can only come when we are truthful with ourselves and our shortcomings.
We've all been hurt, damaged, and wounded, ususally by someone in church with all their well meaning intentions...the walls we build not only keep others out and us "safe", but they keep us "in" where we can't be truly seen...why is it so hard to see that vulnerabilty isn't weakness though, it's strength...

at some point i feel like people stopped seeing me, maybe in reality i just stopped letting them...

Lord, I need your strength to show me how to be vulnerable again...