Growth

While I'm on the subject of Wennberg's Faith on the Edge, I must also record one other excerpt that meant a lot to me:

"We can mistakenly believe . . . that healthy spirituality will always move apace, accompanied by immediately evident signs of progress. [We surmise that] this is what healthy spirituality is supposed to look like, and if that is not what is happening, then there is something wrong, we mistakenly conclude. Spiritual progress, it is thought, is always to be rapid and sustained.

"To the contrary, almost all important growth in a life, whether it be spiritual, mental, or physical, takes place so slowly, so gradually, indiscernible increment by indiscernible increment, that one is not even aware that it is taking place.

"But it is, and over time the transformation can be staggering. The 20-inch baby becomes a 6-footer, but at no time is there any awareness of the growth that is occurring. One eats, one plays, and one grows. In time, that infant is the 6-footer.

"Consider intellectual growth, an even better analogy for our purposes. You enter kindergarten as a child with a child's mind. But when you graduate from high school thirteen years later, or from college seventeen years later, the intellectual transformation has been profound. Yet for most of us there were no (or at least very few) quantum leaps forward, nor was our educational experience attended by constant excitement. Even if some of us were a bit lackadaisical about it all and the transformation was not all that it might have been, nevertheless what a dramatic difference those years made in our lives. It just took time, we stayed with it, and we reaped the benefits: an adult mind.

"So it is with spiritual growth. It is a product of long-term commitment to a process that involves worship, sermons, prayer, Scripture, hymns, fellowship, service, trials, temptations, and importantly, life experience. One will seldom be aware of the growth as it is taking place. As with intellectual growth, so it is with spiritual transformation. It is achieved indiscernible increment by indiscernible increment. There is seldom short-term, measurable change or improvement that one can point to. Nevertheless, God's 'invisible grace' is at work in our lives, and it works, as it typically does, in a manner that is slow and steady.

"Typically it is slow and gradual, but all the same it is real and substantial."