Withered

I connect my Spiritual life to the growth and life of plants. That’s not accidental, and in Scripture the imagery of the growth of plants is one that comes up often. Jesus teaches the word of God is cast out like seeds, and that some seeds grow and others don’t. Paul talks about how there are multiple people involved in the growth of a believer, that some plant, some water, but ultimately it is God that grows.

The more we look at this idea that Faith is like a plant that is meant to grow, the more we learn about ourselves, and what He intends for His people to do.

The Word of God has been planted in me. I have the responsibility now to tend to the Growth in my life.

For a long time, I expected my faith and knowledge of God to grow, because I believed once. I sought the Lord, He found me, and I thought that was it.

I let the sprout of my faith alone, neglected, because I thought that I couldn’t be surprised by Scripture. I didn’t water, I didn’t tend, and I didn’t remove things from my life that weren’t promoting Growth in my Soul.

So I withered.

Like a plant in a drought my faith lingered, and eventually I realized when I actually took a long hard look at the plant I had forgotten about, that the only thing that was left, was a seed.

I was ashamed. I was shocked that something I thought I was clinging to had become so feeble — so empty.

I had to decide what to do with this result, and it was the impetus to drive me to seek the Lord again.

So now, I seek to water, to support, to prune, to fertilize, and to encourage the Growth of my soul.

I want the plant that is my Faith to grow into something that is greater than I even think it could be.

I used to think that Faith was something that was either growing or dying. That I was either getting closer to God, or that I was slipping away.

That has shifted ever so slightly recently. There’s a qualifier that needs to be added. A plant grows best when it has been given the right amount of water, right amount of fertilizer, and the right amount of support.

You cannot pour water on a seed all the time, it doesn’t grow without sunlight. You cannot heap fertilizer on dirt without measure, too little and it doesn’t add anything — too much and it burns the plant up.

Spiritual Growth is much the same. You must consistently add to your spiritual growth, but you cannot just dump what you need to grow and expect it to change your life. You must give yourself time to comprehend and grow. The things you’ve changed in your life require time to take effect, seeds don’t sprout in a day.

I have found that determining whether you’ve been growing or fading is something you cannot measure definitively until you have been doing it for a long enough time that something in your life is changed. Only in hindsight can you really tell whether the daily choices that you have been making are drawing you closer. Daily practices that draw and pull your focus upward will allow for growth, but it isn’t until those practices have been going for some time that you will see it.

I’ve learned that I am often not willing to wait for a practice to take root. That I don’t think I’m growing the way that I think I should, and then I fall back into the things that drag me away from where I want to be.

In order to grow, I have to keep the seed of Faith in a place that is suited for growth. That means I must keep working to keep things in my life that are feeding my growth, and cut things from my life that aren’t.