Personal Photo: This is me, when I was little :)
This week I got dressed up for an important meeting for the first time in ages. I wore heels, put on a new dress, and did my makeup. When I looked at myself in the mirror, the girl that always seems so young in my eyes was looking back at me as a full-grown adult. I know I am 23, and I should feel like an adult, especially being married and having a job and a house, but truly, I feel like a child most days. It really is not a bad thing in my opinion, but it did take me a few moments to accept my growth and adulthood when I stood there looking so professional.
The concept of growth is one that has always fascinated me. People have so many different opinions about growing how it relates to knowledge, aging, and more. For me, I only recently could begin to detach myself from previous versions of who I was, acknowledging and appreciating that I am a work in progress and do not have to assign to myself the embarrassing moments and mistakes of my past. I have grown into a different person and I learned from who I was. I like this fact; I like that I can learn something that changes the way I see the world, see myself, and see others. I can understand more about how to behave, who I want to be, and I can always take a step towards being a better person. It is a powerful tool for me, as I am not one to ever stop thinking about ways to grow, how to be better in the roles I fill in my life, and how to best appreciate the period of life I am in.
However, I think that it can be easy for us to find that we have a stagnant relationship with growth. We can often find ourselves guilty of feeling like we made it, like we have our lives put together for now, and like we just need to focus on making it to the next step. We can get busy, we can fall off of our routines and goals, we can soak hours into meaningless things, and we can find ourselves losing the ambition to be students of God's creations. Truly, growth goes hand in hand with time. How we spend our time is going to impact how much we grow. Who we spend our time with, where we spend our time, what we spend our time doing, and so on is going to affect how we think, how we behave, and how much we grow. This stagnancy with growth comes when time slips away from us, and we lose ourselves in the mundane pattern of normality.
Stagnancy is one of the most dangerous traps we fall into as humans. Think about it: we find ourselves unexcited about life, caught up in what we do all the time, struggling to make ends meet and get to the next day, or to the next project, or to the next meeting. We jam pack our schedules so full that we leave no space for wonder, gratitude, and prayer. We can be focused on all the things that have deadlines, need to be paid or mailed or finished, we might have families to tend to and take care of, birthdays, events, holidays, and more that the weight of being an adult can really wear on us. Yes, growing up can mean that the carefree joys and excitement about the world fade into the background, leaving only piles of things that need to get done. It leaves little time for fun and increases the chances that we become stagnant in our growth while we try to cross things off our to-do list. It's unfortunate, isn't it?
Growing up does not necessarily mean that we no longer make time for joy, it just means that we have to work harder to make time for it. When I began thinking about the journey of growth and what parts of me still feel like a child and which ones are starting to feel heavier with the weight of adult responsibilities, I was refreshed by the realization that we are all still children of God and His word. No matter our age, what responsibilities we have, how heavy the weight of the world feels, we can all come to Jesus as a child, full of wonder and joy. In my opinion, being a child functions synonymously with having a lot left to learn and being eager to learn it. Children are always so excited about the smallest of things. Children have the ability to wonder without fear, to become students of God's world, and to remain overjoyed with the possibility of learning something new. As adults, we can often lose this wonder, forget that we have much to learn, and consider ourselves knowledgeable about a lot of things. And while we might actually be knowledgeable about many things, it is important to remember we can always learn more from God. He can teach us more about love, grace, forgiveness, Jesus, and so much more. Overwhelming pride in our own understanding, along with the lack of humbleness towards God as a teacher is what really makes us stagnant in our growth. It makes us lose our wonder and it causes our time to become stale with indifference and exhaustion instead of focusing on appreciating the gift of each moment. Jesus tells us in Mark 10:14-15 "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” Jesus is telling us here that it is crucial to see the world through a child's eyes. Jesus is full of hope and light and instead of letting the years disappoint and callus us, by spending time with Him and His word, we can remain positive and faithful.
Children can often be looked upon as naive, silly, or unrealistic, but when we shift the perspective to see unbridled joy in small gifts, the dependence and trust of a child, and the willingness to soak up observations around us, we can see the value of reminding ourselves that we are children still and can come to God and His word in this way. In Matthew 18:2-4, we are told of when "He called a little child to Him and placed the child among them. And he said: Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." Jesus directly addresses the dismissal of children here, and He pushes it aside to make room for the open-minded attitude of young ones. We can come to God the same way; we can shed the weight of the responsibilities we carry as adults and trust that God is going to take care of us while we do our best. We can remain open-minded when we read the Bible, relying on our faith in God's promises He tells us. We can be eager to learn anything and everything about the Bible, God's love, and His teachings. The list goes on and on, encouraging us to focus on ways we can grow with God and how He prevents us from becoming stagnant.
When we do this--When we dial in on the ways we can remain amazed by the Lord and what He does, we find that we spend our time basking in His love, working hard to do our best and give Him glory, and we appreciate more of the blessings in our lives. Instead of being weighed down by the mundane and the things that make us stagnant in our growth, we can thrive in His light, leave our burdens at the base of the cross, and be overjoyed that we are saved! We have so many reasons to remain eager to seek Jesus, to see the world through His love, and to give Him power in our lives. We can be refreshed by the fact that we can come to Jesus without being expected to know all of the answers, have it all figured out, and be the responsible adult. Instead, we can come to Him with humble trust, the dependency upon His grace, and faith in His promises. We are all still children of God. He loves us and takes care of us and in order to appreciate all He does for us, we must maintain the attitude that we will always have a lot to learn from Him, we can always grow more in our faith and in our relationship with Christ, and we can always give Him more glory. No matter how many times you read the Bible, no matter how many hours you pray, no matter how many times you go to church, we can all still learn from God. We can all remain children to Him and rely upon Him during all times.
1 Peter 2:2-3 tells us "Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good." We can see here another example regarding the value of growth in the Lord's light. Once we begin to recognize the wonder of the Lord, we can come back to it time and time again to encourage our growth with Him. We come to Him in need of the salvation He has given us and can trust in Jesus as our Savior and Redeemer. Praise God! Being exhausted in life and having periods of slow growth does not mean that we are taking His gifts for granted, but instead spending time with the Lord allows us to take some of the pressure off. We do not have to be perfect; We aren't perfect, but Jesus is, meaning that when we come to Him exhausted and stagnant, we can walk away from our time with Him rejuvenated, inspired, and as children. Leaving as a refreshed child of God is another way that we can remain excited about potential growth.
I mentioned earlier that growth goes hand in hand with time. In order to grow, we need to spend our time the right way. I am a firm believer than once we continuously remind ourselves that we are children of God and students of His word, we spend more and more time recognizing the ways in which His hand is working in our lives. We appreciate the snowflakes and their delicacy, we notice the Holy Spirit sitting with us while we are alone, we trust that we are struggling with a job for a reason that He already knows, and we remain hopeful in a world lost in sin because we trust in Jesus's promise to return. One thing leads to another and we find our mundane world bursting with the color and brightness of the Lord's light, and we see growth in our relationship with God and ourselves. We begin to find joy in the little things, we appreciate the world that God created for us, and we look in the mirror to find us just as eager to learn and excited about the Word as children are.
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