Growing Hurts, but it’s worth it

Any time we’ve made spiritual progress, we should expect to be tested and will probably find ourselves a few steps behind where we started.  The moment of awareness is usually the apex before the fall.   However, the goal is to persist in trusting in God’s mercy and willingness to forgive us and allow us to “begin again.”

As a mom of teens and older, getting them to see that you can “begin again,” and that the actions of a day are all we can do, all we can improve upon, is a tough sell.   Gardening, writing, running, all of these activities reveal the nature of how we learn, how we grow.  It is slow. It is over time. It often hurts to persist.

Right now, for example.

I can think of a lot of tasks, fun things, important things, trivial things, all sorts of things, I could do.  To sit at the keyboard and move the keys, requires I will it beyond when I feel inspired.

As I told my students today, writers do not wait for inspiration. They write their way into it. Likewise, saints do not fall into holiness, they make a habit of holiness to help them when they fall out of it.

Every talent we wish to hone, requires hours of our time, our willing surrender of our focus to that one thing.   Piano, art, knowledge, karate, video games, all of it, requires we commit the time required to be bad at it.    Chesterton wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” not because the world should be run by amatuers, but because the important things in life require that we work at it.  Talent is insufficient.  One must be willing to stumble, fall, struggle.

Likewise, we do not value what comes too easily.

We do not praise an eigth grader for reading aloud, “Green Eggs and Ham,” because we expect that an eighth grader can read such a book with ease.   We admire the person attempting their first marathon.  They will not run the fastest, but completion itself is a tremendous achievement.    We value people who persist through the struggle.

So also, God values our efforts, and counts all of them.  He loves our persistence, it is a source of joy to the source of all joy.

The saints understood that all progress came haltingly, and that each setback or struggle was an opportunity to lean more upon our Lord.  Ultimately, we need to reach the point that we lay down on the cross and hold to it.  That’s when God knows that we know, to trust Him utterly.

When we no longer try to carry it, but allow ourselves to be carried with it, we are resting in God’s heart, and allowing our own to be molded.

So if you are struggling. If prayer or service or presence, if all of it requires more of you than you expect, and it’s hard, know that this is a growing season, and growing is hard work.  The fruit however, is worth the process, worth the time.   Trust that God’s plan involves you growing, so that you will produce much fruit.