By Stefanie Tan
"...In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength..." - Isaiah 30:15
We can be too soft on ourselves and make excuses for our wrongdoing and sins. But we can also be too hard on ourselves, especially regarding spiritual growth and development. We somehow think that our spiritual growth should follow with our experience of other aspects of life. There we can see definite signs of progress which are clearly measurable. We complete courses, projects, work assignments. We are given more responsibility and receive greater remuneration. We can clearly track the development of our careers.
But we cannot do quite the same with the spiritual life. One reason is that much of that life is hidden deeply within us. Some of it remains a mystery. Most of it cannot be quantified. And the rules are so very different from the way we experience things at work.
For in the spiritual life, progress sometimes means going back. Maturity involves childlikeness. Having means letting go. We can safely say that the spiritual life operates on a different wisdom, and all the pushing and shoving that so characterises our workaday world will hardly serve us in our spiritual growth. We cannot push our spiritual growth and make it happen with quick-fix methods.
Instead, we need to begin to make gentle moves, moves born of a wisdom from above. In discovering that wisdom we will learn with Henri Nouwen that 'I do not have to move faster than I can'. My spiritual development won't result from driven behaviour. It will only come from careful listening, quiet surrender and active and purposeful engagement. It will come from what I do, but only from that which is done in harmony with God's wisdom. But most of all, it will come from what was given, not what was expected.
1 comments:
Awesome. So encouraged to see someone coming up to post! Yay!
It's so true that it's hard - even impossible - to quantify spiritual growth. It's easy in the office to have KPIs but all the cell reports in the world still won't tell you what you can learn face to face, heart to heart.
I find it sometimes uncomfortable that it's not easily quantified. As a fan of sports, I like to lean on stats to see how well my team is doing. They don't really lie. But nobody's keeping score for us on our spiritual life (nobody on this side of heaven anyways!), and so it's not so easy to track how we're doing.
And sometimes, maybe, the test comes in the mundane everydays, and then sometimes, the test comes in crisis. Scary part is that we won't know till it shows up.
Or is there a way to gauge our spiritual health?
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