We Are Not Born As We Will Stay

A Monarch butterfly with vivid orange and black wings rests inside a sealed glass jar, sitting on a light wooden surface. Soft natural light highlights the butterfly’s delicate features against a muted gray background. — Faith was never meant to live like this.
*Image created with Leonardo.ai and edited in Photoshop.*

Graduation season just wrapped. Three ceremonies in a matter of weeks—two college, one high school. Three of my kids crossing thresholds, moving forward, shedding old versions of themselves. Sitting there, I watched them—these humans I’ve raised—walk across stages into the next unknowns. They have changed. They have grown. In ways I expected and in ways I didn’t. I’m proud of them—deeply proud—not just because they’ve accomplished things, but because they are becoming themselves.

That’s what life is supposed to be: transformation. Messy, unpredictable, unrepeatable. Growth isn’t linear. It doesn’t follow a syllabus. But it does move. And if it’s not moving, it’s probably dying.

Going Deeper Isn’t the Same as Growing Up

In religious circles, we like to use the word growth a lot. It’s typically paired with a humblebrag—“I’ve really been going deeper in my faith lately”—as if God is hiding somewhere under a few more layers of the same study guide you’ve read three times already. But going “deeper” often just means becoming more entrenched in what you already believe.

I used to go to Sunday School. Then I taught Sunday School. Then I became a pastor. Eventually, I realized I didn’t need church anymore—not because I’d lost my faith, but because I’d outgrown what they were trying to sell me. And that’s not backsliding—it’s growing up. Because growth doesn’t always mean reinforcement. Sometimes it means undoing. Sometimes it means realizing the foundation you were standing on wasn’t solid—it was just familiar.

Going deeper into a hole is still a hole. Real transformation looks more like a caterpillar liquefying inside a cocoon, having its entire body restructured into something completely different. If that doesn’t make your church’s adult discipleship class sound a little underwhelming, I don’t know what will.

Some People Calcify—and Their Churches Help Them Do It

You ever visit someone you haven’t seen in years and realize they’re exactly the same? Same job. Same complaints. Same chair. Same emotional temperature as they had when you were last together. It’s like stepping into a time capsule sealed with nicotine stains and talk radio.

Some people don’t evolve. They calcify. They’ve traded the wild, beautiful chaos of becoming for the stale comfort of staying the same. And in a weird, tragic way—they’re proud of it. They look at a changing world and rage that it refuses to freeze-frame with them. They see others grow and assume they’ve compromised. But here’s the truth: they didn’t “figure life out.” They just gave up on it changing. Because real growth hurts. And they’d rather pretend everything is fine than admit they’re scared of being undone.

Churches are full of these folks—mostly because churches have catered to them. Go back to one of the churches you grew up in. Sure, the carpet’s been replaced and the coffee now comes from a Keurig, but beyond that? The same hymns, the same fears, the same script. They’re reenactments, not revivals. Less Holy Spirit, more spiritual cosplay.

Sameness Feels Holy, But It’s Just Avoidance

Sameness feels holy because it’s predictable. Certainty is addictive. It allows people to believe they’re in control. But faith isn’t certainty. It’s movement. It’s risk. It’s stepping into mystery with open hands.

Comfort is not a fruit of the Spirit. And the only thing in nature that never changes is a rock—or a corpse. Churches sell sameness as stability, but it’s just avoidance with better branding. You’re not walking by faith if you’re standing still.

Some treat spiritual life like a Civil War reenactment—dressing up in the same roles, performing the same tired lines, convinced they’re still fighting the good fight while the rest of the world burns around them. It’s easier to call everything too woke than to admit you’ve intellectually and spiritually flatlined.

It’s not just their faith that stopped evolving—it’s their curiosity. Their capacity for new ideas. The muscle of the mind atrophies when you only exercise it inside the walls of your favorite echo chamber.

And let’s not pretend this doesn’t have consequences. When people trade growth for nostalgia, they don’t just stall spiritually—they start demanding the world stand still too. That’s how you get book bans, attacks on education, and politics built entirely on the idea that everything was better before people started asking questions.

People who stay the same often say it’s because they’re “rooted.” But Jesus had this annoying habit of asking people to get up and walk. To leave home. To let the dead bury their dead. To stop looking back.

Staying the same doesn’t make you faithful. It makes you fossilized.

Growth Is the Point

Watching my kids walk those stages, I was reminded: they didn’t get here by staying the same. They became. And that becoming was sometimes messy, confusing, even painful. But it’s theirs. Their own path. Their own identity. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

That’s the hope I carry—not just for them, but for all of us: that we keep becoming. That we resist the lure of sameness. That we stop confusing spiritual rigor mortis with righteousness.

Because we are not born as we will stay. And those who claim they’ve transcended the pain of change haven’t. They’ve just decided to stop feeling.

And that’s not growth. That’s surrender.