Room to Grow (Friday Devotional)

 

And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

- Luke 2:52

When I was in kindergarten, I remember one special Arbor Day when students helped plant a new tree on the grounds of the school. Placing the acorns gently in the ground, we all worked to pack soil around it and christen it with its first watering. When the day came to an end, we were able to step back and proudly say, “We planted a tree.”

So you can imagine my dismay when my parents dropped me off at school the following Monday and the giant oak I expected to see was nowhere to be found. Indeed, all that was in the spot where we’d worked so hard was the same patch of soil we’d left there on Friday, like nothing had happened over the weekend. Disappointed and concerned, I asked my parents and my teacher where our tree was, and they had to laugh as they explained, “It’ll take a while before the tree gets big and tall. It needs some time to grow.”

What we understand about trees we are slower to acknowledge about people, it seems. Ours is a culture suspicious of people whose capabilities and beliefs are anything less than fully formed—to say, “I need to learn more about that,” is to be unprepared; to say “I’ve changed my mind because I learned some new things” is to be without conviction. In school, in business, and in daily conversations, you are expected to have it all figured out all the time. Even in the church, there is too often little tolerance for those with doubts and questions, much less faults and struggles.

So what a blessing it is on this day after Epiphany, having concluded the season spent celebrating Jesus’ birth, to remember that Jesus grew. When God sent his Son, things didn’t begin with Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River at age 30—Jesus was born and then he had to grow “in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” We know little about Jesus’s adolescence, but we do know he wasn’t delivering rough drafts of the Sermon on the Mount in the synagogue nursery. Like any human being, he first needed to learn and to mature into the divine calling laid out for him.

When the Bible talks about life in Christ, we ought to remember that it uses the language of being “born again”—and so, as with any birth, we need to allow for and expect steady growth rather than instant transformation. No one comes to faith as a fully formed disciple, and that shouldn’t be our expectation. Rather, we ought to extend grace to anyone—including ourselves—who is sincerely trying to learn and grow, even and especially when there are moments of stumbling along the way.

Majestic oaks don’t spring up overnight; they have to grow from the humblest of beginnings—and the same is true of Jesus, a mighty Savior who started life as a baby in a manger. As his disciple, may you have the patience and the grace for a life of growth.