This is Felicia Ferguson with Christian Mix 106, helping you Build Faith for the Journey
Growth hurts. When I was fifteen, I spent a few days in the high school nurse’s office lying on her bedtable. My joints and ligaments ached so deeply that I couldn’t concentrate on my schoolwork. It physically hurt to sit in the hard desk chair. And there was nothing to ease the pain. They said I was just physically growing. My muscles, tendons, and ligaments were stretching. I found it odd at the time. After all, hadn’t I been growing all my life without feeling this type of pain? Thankfully, that period of life didn’t last long, and I ended up at my five-foot five and a half inches pretty quickly and stopped.
But emotional and even spiritual growth can be just as painful. It can also and in reality should happen for the rest of our lives. We should never want to stop growing. But the pain that often accompanies that emotional and spiritual growth is not trifling. It can be soul deep, even devastating, shattering our world as we know it. We may be leaving behind a relationship that once meant so much to us. Or a door we thought would always be open may be closing. We may finally be facing past traumas and starting to work through them.
In these instances, God is lopping off wild branches where we have been growing in the wrong direction for his vineyard. And lopping hurts. But this pain is for our good. It steers and guides us to be the people God created and called us to be. In a sense, God is following his own proverb. He is training up his children in the way they should go. So even though growth is painful, we can trust God’s plan and purpose for it.
I’m Felicia Ferguson; thanks for listening to Christian Mix 106.