The past two weeks have been challenging to me and a lot has been going in internally; a shifting. Today I want to share with you where I am at, in hopes of helping you wherever you may be in life at the moment. I don’t know about you but I know I like to seem like I have it all together and if I don’t I certainly love to “fake the funk.” Pastor Quinton, co-director of the Destiny School of Ministry which I attend, told us on the first day that this would not be easy and that at some point if we didn’t hate the process or get offended then the DSOM has failed. He said this not as a goal of the school but rather as an acknowledgement that when we allow God in and get intentional with Him that things can get down and gritty and just plain hard. Over the course of the past few weeks I have gotten to that point of hating the process because the closer I get to God the more my junk surfaces. It is not a plesant feeling or place to be in life. PQ asked me how I was doing and in full honesty I told him, “I feel like everything I try to succeed in just fails.” His response was in his true enigmatic Yoda like form: “Good. That tells me that growth is happening.” I have been going through Growing Pains.
Growing Pains is not just the name of the beloved 80s-90s sitcom (which was great) but it’s something we all go through in life. Here at ATW, we love definitions; they help make sense of things so let’s take a look at them. One of the primary definitions of the word growing pains is: “pain in muscles or joints sometimes experienced by children and often attributed to rapid growth.” This childhood pain occurs in the maturing of the body to adolescence for some and is quite painful. I personally have never experienced the physical growing pains but I see there is a spiritual side to it. In “Christianese” we call this process sanctification but we are going to simplify it.
The first thing I did was to make my own definition for this; don’t know if this is allowed but I’m going for it! I define spiritual growing pains as “pain experienced from confronting the flesh issues in ones life as one draws closer to God.” In the past two months I have spent a great amount of time with the Lord in prayer, His Word and other activities. You can’t spend time in the fire of His Presence and not have your will and old habits get burned, it hurts but that’s where I am. I’m sure you have been there too. It hurts but the beauty of it always makes the growing pains worth it! Be on the look out for part 2 as we go deeper on “growing pains.”
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