Growing Stronger and the Reality of You
Reflections on Spiritual Growth
Now, I don’t know about you, but I, without comparison, limit my personal growth. The Church teaches that we, as humans, are made in the image and likeness of God, and thus, our life’s design and purpose is to flourish in that created (original) identity. As I have grown, it has been a battle to come to terms with what is real about this process and how I, as a person, am made to become who I am.
What is real about personal growth is that growth is not easy. One lens through which I see this reality, growth being hard, is in my history relating to weight management! It is hard to become morbidly obese. It is also hard to become and stay somewhere in a healthy range weight-wise for one’s particular God-given frame. Gaining weight requires choosing time and again and again to hurt yourself, to do something that is not going to help your growth but rather will stunt that growth and thus, in reality, make you weaker and less free to be what you are.
Shift this lens from weight to the broader issue of spiritual growth. But before I say much there, let me be really clear about what I mean by spiritual. Every person is, at his or her definitional core, a spiritual being in the sense that God is Spirit, and He created you in His image and likeness. Spiritual, and thus spirituality, is learning to live and grow from within the factual basis of our real identities as persons living today in a body with time and space to occupy because of the willful initiative of a Creator who is external to ourselves.
Your spiritual growth is bound to the reality that you are a person made to be a person as God defines a person. So from here, big questions arise, such as: What is a person? Who defines what a person is? Who says what a person isn’t? What diversity fits in the definition of a person? What do all persons have in common and why? Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of my life?
All people’s purpose in life is to grow spiritually, to become what they are, as defined by their Creator’s design. So, back to where we started. I am the worst at getting in the way of my own becoming! So are you! That is something we all have in common. And it is in common for two primary reasons:
Growth is hard, and
Growth requires a context conducive to growth.
Thankfully, God has created the context within which we are invited to grow. I’ll reflect on that next…unless I change my mind!