Growth

A volleyball/playgroup friend and his family visited from Maryland this week, and we got to spend some time with them today. It was so neat to see his daughter, who is a little older than Elizabeth, and how much she had changed in the two years since we'd last seen her. When she left, she was shy and slow-to-warm-up, but today she ran right into the indoor playground and played with our horde of children the whole time!

[Side note: I just asked Isaac how to spell horde. He confirmed that I had spelled it correctly, and when I commented how weird it looked, he replied, "I assumed you meant that instead of whored." Thanks, babe.]

Similarly, we took Elizabeth ice skating tonight, and we hadn't gone since the semi-disaster last year. She took to it like a natural and was able to skate on single bladed skates without even holding our hands or a chair. I was so proud.

Sometimes, growth seems to happen all of a sudden, and sometimes you don't really notice it until you look at it in retrospect. I think my relationship with God is often like that. Every so often, I have an exciting time of growth where He's clearly working in some area of my life. For example, two years ago He taught me a lot about intentionally sharing Him and purposely developing relationships with people who don't know Him. I grew hugely during that time (although I still have a very long way to go in that area).

Other times, it seems like nothing is happening until I look back and compare now to where I was some time ago. For example, I remember about three years ago, I was really focusing on simply trying to think about God and eternal things all day long rather than letting hours (and, I confess, sometimes days) go by without really paying attention to what God wants. Now, that kind of thinking is usually an every-day, hourly thing for me. That happened slowly, not all at once.

When I examine my life, there is an absurd number of areas that I want to grow in and that I need God to change. I sometimes have to remember that growth isn't always sudden and is a continual process. I love that, because it means that in a year or two my relationship with God can be totally different than it is now. While I wish that could happen all at once (please suddenly make me more holy, more loving, more wise!), I'm content to wait eagerly for the hope that I know is coming.

Wow. This post really got off-track from the ice-skating post I had planned!