Peter and maturity

"I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go. Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, Follow me!" (John 21.18-19)

I think this text - which comes directly after Jesus' re-instatement of Peter - teaches us something about the journey to maturity for each one of us. As we grow older (and hopefully wiser) we make an increasing number of committments. We may choose a university, a job, a home, a spouse, to have a child or some other such life-changing decision. Such commitments bring us great life, but they also have a cost attached. Their cost is that we are not able to follow our own path so rigidly as we once were. We get swept up into the paths of others. In other words, we are brought into community as we commit.

This is life as God would have it and this is the type of life that Jesus is showing Peter he will lead from that point on. Martin Luther-King famously said that the one thing he would like to leave behind was 'a committed life' and I think this should be our aim too. But as Jesus shows us here, we don't need to worry about what we will commit too or where we should spend our energies. As we follow him He will direct our paths and lead us into the freedom that comes from mature commitment.