Babies are born and normally weigh in the vicinity of 6 pounds, but then they start to grow and end up like me at a couple of hundred pounds. When I was in the 6th grade I was the second smallest kid in the class including the girls, but the next year I went on a growth spurt and grew 11 inches in one year. I went from being 5 feet tall to 5 feet 11 inches tall, and never grew a fraction of an inch more after that. But then I started growing in weight and strength, my eighth-grade year when I stopped growing in height I weighed right at 100 pounds and by the end of my Sophomore year in High School I weighed in at almost 200 pounds. Through those years I remember friends and family saying constantly, ”my how you have grown”!

Spiritual growth, becoming more and more like Jesus in character is patterned after the nature of physical growth. A baby takes quite a few years to grow physically and we take most of a lifetime to grow spiritually. Some observations; growth happens in spurts, it isn’t a nice consistent line climbing upward. Our spiritual life has seasons of radical growth, but a serious problem shows up at this point, the cause of our radical spiritual growth is almost always unpleasant to downright painful. Growth takes cooperation on our part. When I was growing 11 inches and 130 lbs in 4 years I cooperated with my physical body by eating, I ate a lot, all the time as my Mom said. I don’t know why I would have, but I could have chosen to not eat and then I wouldn’t have grown, simple as that. Spiritual growth spurts take place at the point of suffering, pain, and trials, almost always, but we can short circuit the whole natural process of spiritual growth by simply complaining, grumbling, and feeling sorry for ourselves. Simple as that.

This coronavirus thing has been driving me nuts, but it would be cool if this was possibly a time of a spiritual growth spurt, and when it is all over someone would look at me and say, ”My, how you have grown”!