Putting Away the Old Group Chat

Is this a scolding?

That line can sound like a scolding. I think the sentences around it make the question less about whether someone is childish and more about what changes as understanding grows.

Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things.

The speaker names three childhood ways of being: speaking, feeling, and thinking. One possible reading is that these ways don’t get the final word as life changes. The passage doesn’t say childhood itself is shameful, or spell out exactly what gets put away.

Picture a group chat where an old misunderstanding keeps resurfacing as a screenshot. That might help picture setting aside something that no longer helps. But the comparison stops there: this passage isn’t about deleting a message, and it doesn’t tell us what any particular person should leave behind.

Does growing up mean knowing more?

A reader might ask whether putting away childish things means becoming certain, or finally having everything figured out. The lines around the key sentence point somewhere less tidy.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part;

First, the passage says knowledge is partial. Then it describes seeing dimly now and knowing fully later. Those are two concrete observations: what we know is incomplete, and the picture we have isn’t clear yet. I think that leaves room for growth without saying adulthood means total understanding.

Imagine autocorrect changing a message before it’s sent. Noticing the change can help, but it doesn’t make the sender an expert on every word. That’s only a small analogy, not the passage’s explanation; it can’t tell us what the complete understanding mentioned here will be.

What stays in view?

After naming knowledge, faith, and hope, the passage gives love the central place. It also describes love in particular ways: patient and kind, not insisting on its own way.

The greatest of these is love.

I notice that the passage doesn’t make maturity a scorecard. It places partial knowledge beside love, then names faith, hope, and love as what remain. One possible reading is that growing up isn’t just collecting answers; how people treat one another matters alongside what they know.

The passage doesn’t list every example of childish things, so there’s room to disagree about what the speaker means. If it seems useful, a reader could carry one sentence from it into the day and notice what it brings to mind.