Almost always, growth is a process.

20Sep
Your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding, that I may learn your commandments.
- Psalm 119:73

Almost always, growth is a process. Spiritual growth, intellectual growth and certainly physical growth all take time and effort. And yet, too often, the process is not embraced, celebrated or even acknowledged.

As I begin a new job in a new and unfamiliar place, I continually find myself wanting to be settled. I want to unpack everything and get things exactly where I want them to be as quickly as possible because I tell myself that will mean I will be comfortable. Those I’m living with often remind me that it’s OK to take it slow, and to relax, even if everything is not done. Perhaps, even, it is OK to be uncomfortable.

It is similar to when I was first in college, far from home, and I struggled to invest in the early stages of new relationships because I didn’t feel they had the same value as the friendships I’d left behind. Only once I invested in the process did it become possible for that value to form.

Psalm 119 reminds us that even God works in processes, through us and in creating us. God’s hands not only made us, they also fashioned us. To make can sound like a singular action, though it almost never is, but to fashion clearly evokes more of a process, with adjustments to small details just like those I might make to the positioning of a coffee table book or lamp in my new home. 

And then we are reminded that, like God, we too work in processes, even in our relationships with our creator. The Psalm does not say that I may “know” your commandments, as if God will give you that knowledge in an instantons moment of divine revelation. It says learn. Learning God’s plan for us is a process, and not always a simple one. Living that plan, and those commandments, is surely a process too, and rarely a simple one.

Musical Reflection - Changes - David Bowie

God, help us to embrace the process, celebrating the steps along the way to your commandments, and if the path forward is long and it is hard to see the end, grant us the strength and peace to walk without doubt or frustration. Amen.

Psalms
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#time #value #patience

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