Hello and welcome to the John Malcolm and Teachings podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host.

Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space and it's great to have you with us.

We're continuing our special series spiritual cartography, Cutter and Four content from the Practice in the Way book,

all about navigating the stages and season of spiritual life.

In this week's episode, John Mark impacts how understanding the first and second half of life

can help us name both the temptations and the invitations of each stage

and stay faithful to Jesus in every season.

Here's John Mark.

Have you ever been in the room for the birth of a child?

To witness new life emerge from the womb and receive the gift of its first breath.

Have you ever had the chance to watch that child grow up

ever so slowly, to see them pass through the awkward stages of learning to crawl and walk and

eventually run, of growing into their arms and legs, of trying to get their brain to catch up

to their body? Every step of the road is a miracle.

In the same way that our body is designed to grow through stages, infancy, childhood,

adolescence, adulthood, old age, our soul goes through stages too. What I'm calling spiritual

cartography in this series, developmental psychologists call

stage theory. It's the attempt to plot the stages of psychospiritual growth that we experience

over our lifetime. It's an attempt to map the journey of apprenticeship to Jesus over the

arc of a life in order to plot yourself on that map and better name Jesus'

warnings and invitations at each step of the journey.

As the spiritual writer Ronald Rollheuser put it, we mature by meeting life just as God and nature

...