Let nurturing your relationship with God be one of your resolutions this year
News flash: A central Texas woman gave birth yesterday to a healthy six-foot, 175-pound baby boy. The miracle child was born fully grown after 36 hours of hard labor. Mother and son are reported to be in good condition.
This story is too silly even for a supermarket tabloid. We all know that beginnings are slow and hard, that we move from little to large gradually; we cannot jump straight to adulthood without going though necessary stages of growth and development. Yet we sometimes get frustrated that we aren’t growing more rapidly as human beings.
January is resolutions month, and most of us teeter up with new energies toward improvement, and then tooter down with discouragement over how far we need to grow. Physical fitness, weight control, relationship nurturing, work success, parenting improvement: All these tend to appear on our lists.
Spiritual growth should, too. Even there, though, we must fight the frustration that we are not further along in maturity when we are forever to be called children of God.
Godly nurturing conspires with remade nature over time to do the trick. Steady plodding leads to spiritual progress.
When your doctor tells you to start exercising, you won’t run a four-minute mile the first day or the first year. When you begin a new diet, give yourself more than three days to slim down. Learning a new language or a musical instrument takes regular lessons and practice aplenty.
As you pen New Year’s resolutions to grow spiritually, keep in mind the stubborn fact of how you are made. Maturity comes over time through faithful discipline. Mastering small aspects of spiritual discipline is a regime for success.
Prayer first. Keep it simple and let the words be yours. You may read elegant prayers of the masters to get the hang of it, but your honest, stuttering words count for more with God than borrowed ones. Prayer puts you in touch with the One who aims to guide and empower your growth.
Bible reading, next. Bite off small bits and digest them well, rather than swallowing whole chapters in one gulp, which only leads to indigestion. A few morsels of wisdom that nourish your soul are better than large servings devoured that go right through you.
Get your finances in order by giving 10 percent of your earnings to charity as an act of stewardship. Give yourself to a mission project, too; maybe a short-term one to get your feet wet and learn the secret of service.
A year from now you will still not be spiritually full-grown, but if you measure your soul on the back of the kitchen door, you may find that you’ve inched up without realizing it.
