July 11, 2014
“Growing pains,” my mother would say whenever I brought up some unexplained cramp or strain. “Part of growing up.” My pre-adolescent mind would imagine bones expanding like tectonic plates under the earth, stretching muscles and nerves in the process. Although the pains continued, I had some kind of explanation for them. I was growing and this was the price.
We normally don’t think of growing a something painful. We plant things all the time and expect they will spring up out of the soil, and put out leaves and flowers when it’s time. Our modern evolutionary assumptions give us a sense of a creation ceaselessly moving forward, from little amoeba in the water to creatures like ourselves. That’s what we do: we grow. Growth seems almost inevitable to us.
So it’s a bit stunning to read St. Paul’s language from the eighth chapter of Romans. He sees creation moving forward, too – toward completion, toward liberation. But he sees this as a groaning, as if life was in endless struggle to make advances, to conquer the forces that beset it, to find full life completely liberated. Not only does he see the cosmos groaning; he sees us at the head of this cosmos, groaning for freedom in our prayer, and us bringing the cosmos along with us until God fully reveals the glory of the liberated brothers and sisters of Christ.
Jesus, too, hardly sees growth as something simple. He gives us the image of seed thrown all around by a particularly extravagant, and perhaps wasteful, sower. We hear all the places the seed falls and we instinctually put them into different categories. Yes, some seed faced temptation from riches. Some seed faced temptation from fear. Some seed simply did not grow. But some of it did. I wonder, though, if it is also not possible to see all the different situations the seed face as different phases we face in our lives. Because when are we free from temptation, from fear, from laziness, from shallowness? When have we produced even at 30 percent, let alone 60 or 90 percent? Following Jesus is a constant struggle to make sure the Word of God grows within us. Following Jesus means we disciples can never rest.
Yet, as we hear from Isaiah, as much as the struggle involves us, the glory involves what God is doing among us. “Like rain falling on the earth,” Isaiah, “bringing forth fruit and food, so my Word goes out – and it will not return to me empty.” God works alongside us, within us, and even through our struggles and fears, to bring about God’s fruit – the fullness of life in the Kingdom. God works in and through us to move creation forward toward its fulfillment. No pain we suffer, says Paul, can begin to compare to the Kingdom God is bringing about.
Isn’t it true in our own lives as we think back? The times when we had to work the hardest, when we felt least understood, when we faced the greatest tests – when we look back, weren’t these the times of greatest growth for us? The struggle of the caterpillar to get out of the cocoon becomes the way it grows wings, the way it grows to its destiny of being some far more than a caterpillar – a gloriously-colored butterfly. God is showing us a way to understand life: growing pains, which are part of the emergence of God’s glory in our lives.