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I have been quiet - I thought perhaps silence might become a vocation - infact sometimes I wish that it would - that I could become a hearth sitter and while away my days in quiet conversation. Not likely!!

So to the subject at hand - growing up. Do you ever look in the mirror and see the adult staring back at you and think - I wonder how that happened - I don't FEEL grown-up. Sometimes we don't act the way we think grown-ups should we say and do things better suited to elementary school children. But most of the time, most of us muddle through with this grown up thing pretty well - even if our self-doubt makes us want to run away to the nearest candy store sometimes.

That mixture of things, knowing and not knowing, learning and guessing is what being a grown-up is. It is about stepping up when we need to and taking responsibility - only asking for our fair share and helping those less fortunate than ourselves. In the Church it is about being the leaders around the table - about helping our children and young people grow in faith and to work hard on community.

In every church I have ever known there are grown-ups who refuse to grow up or perhaps cannot grow up. They probably, in fairness, do not even see their own behavior as anything except normal because they tend to be isolated and isolating. They often like specific things, often old fashioned things, against the mainstream and will bully relentlessly if anything in their surroundings changes.

However, before you write them off, a word of caution. I have never met one of these people who did not have a huge dollop of sadness which had either stopped them growing up or sent them right back to a pre-adolescent cops and robbers attitude to the world - where everyone except them is a robber.

I have yet to meet someone who is a bully who is not hiding some terrible pain - but this is not so much aimed at the victim as those who know there is something terribly off-kilter. If you are constantly tip-toeing around some area of your life, be it something in your past or something in your present, you need to fix it because otherwise you will become the bully - probably accidentally, just trying to protect yourself from more pain.

Odd note to return on - but this subject has come to roost a couple of times this week in various places.