40%

Eleven years ago today I graduated from high school.  I remember that not because it was a particularly meaningful day, but because a friend reminded me that today is her birthday and I remembered that I had graduated on that day.  Eleven years, to those who have been out of school twenty and thirty years, probably doesn't seem like a lot.  But eleven years for me represents almost forty percent of my life.  And, in that forty percent of my life, I have discovered a great deal.  Perhaps most significantly, I now realize that most of what I thought was important at the beginning of that forty percent turns out to be largely insignificant.  I wonder if I will find the same thing eleven years from now.  At that point, I will be forty, and twenty-two years since high school graduation will represent fifty-five percent of my life.  Will I look back on these first years of priesthood and wonder why I wrote what I have written in these posts?  Will I consider these meditations unimportant, and these experiences shallow?  Surely I will have grown and matured, and I will see the immaturity in what I have said here.  In truth, I can't get there without having been here first.  That's the thing with human experience - maturity arises out of immaturity.  The former relies upon the latter and there are no shortcuts between the two.