growth – rhythms of grace

As I come nearer and nearer to my baby’s due date, it’s all feeling overwhelmingly real.

I’m really going to have a child, in like, the next few days or weeks.

I bounce between panic and joy and everything in between. Everyone wants to know how I’m feeling, and to be honest, I don’t even really know. But I know that this is happening, and I know that God is good.

I still don’t feel ready to be a mother, but I know I never will. Instead, I focus on that sweet moment when I finally get to hold this boy in my arms and look into his little eyes (which I hope are the same beautiful blue-green hazel as my husband’s!). I focus on the joy that I’m sure he is going to bring us despite all the sleepless nights that lie ahead. I focus on God and the fact that this is His plan, so He will see it through.

So we wait in anticipation for our little miracle to arrive, and meanwhile I carry on about my day with growing fatigue and discomfort, but also a growing joy. I know, deep in my heart, that this is all worth it. All the pain and fear and discomfort is going to make way for pure joy.

When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.
John 16:21

I’m reminded that this is always the way–anything worth having requires great sacrifice and often suffering. We must go through the “pregnant” period, the season of growth and laboring until there is deliverance. This pregnancy has made that very tangible.

This is only the beginning. Once our sweet boy has arrived there will be a new set of challenges, some of which may feel insurmountable, and I know I will have days where I feel like giving up. It’s easy to listen to all the lies the enemy whispers to me in the night that I don’t have what it takes and that it will all be too much. I know I will be brought to the end of myself over and over again…but that’s a good thing. That’s the only way to truly know God. It’s only at the end of myself that I will meet Him, and He will meet me. My life is not my own–what better way to live in that reality than to raise a child?

I only speak of what I know now–I’m sure my perspective will be very different soon. For now I’m working on surrendering my own life (and my child’s) to a God who loves us both more than we can ever understand.

Our lives should never be stagnant when we follow Jesus. We must always remain in a state of growth and development as He refines us to become more and more like Him. However, growth can be painful, sometimes even excruciating.

Growth means letting go of old habits and developing new ones. It requires constant openness to God and what He’d like to do in our lives and in our hearts. We must look squarely at our own destructive ways and intentionally replace them with life-giving ways, at the Father’s prodding.

He lets us see ourselves as we are so we will be motivated to change. He allows us to see the the extent of our brokenness and helplessness without Him. We have to get to this point in our faith in order to move into the greater things He has for us. He can’t use a self-deluded person to do His work; He can only use those who know their own weakness and humbly submit to Him for strength and guidance. The ones who know their own capacity for sin and realize their need for a Savior. Then He can do the real work in us as we put off our old selves and put on the new (Ephesians 4:22-24). If we’re not open to His correction and tough love, we will not reach the heights He wants to take us to, but remain stuck in our own stubbornness and self-destructive ways.

This summer has been an incredibly growing time for me. And it has not always felt like growth- most times it has felt like retroactive steps; I’m overcome by familiar darknesses that I have faced in the past, and I wonder why they are coming up again. Why I haven’t moved past these things. I start to wonder if I’m just unbearably weak and incapable, a victim of my own mind and fears. I wonder if it will always be this way, if I will always be defeated by these things. That’s the way the enemy would like me to think. He tries to get us stuck in an endless loop of self-pity and fear- a victim mentality. If we remain self-absorbed and wallow in our own helplessness, we will forget to turn to the One who can actually help us.

But by turning to Him and facing these battles again (internal battles of fear, anxiety, purpose, identity, worth…etc.) I am strengthened. He has to bring me back to these places to remind me of my human nature and my absolute need to depend on Him. To remind me that without His love I cannot conquer, that without His thoughts I am hopeless. To remind me how empty I am without Him. These same issues (in different forms and brought about by different circumstances) come up again and again because I keep going back to the old ways of self-sufficiency and illusory control, returning to the place of believing that my life is my own. And that indeed is a fruitless and stagnant place to be.

Even when our circumstances are frustrating and painful, and perhaps especially during these times, we must cling to Him. The sweetest times of growth can be in the biggest times of spiritual and emotional draught. These are the times when we remember that we have a Hope so much greater than what we can see; what is evident in the world around us. And we can remember that the trials we are facing are going to produce something incredible in us.