Change

Change… Change can be uncomfortable, unpredictable, and hard. Even so, it is a necessity of life. Babies grow to be toddlers, toddlers mature into adolescents, and adolescents become adults. Any attempt to remain in any particular station of life is more than avoidance of change; it is a travesty, as change cannot be circumvented. Adolescent boys cannot remain as boys forever, nor can beautiful little girls remain as perpetual princesses. Families grow, people mature, life moves on, and the way things once were are but an illusion hiding the way things currently exist; change happens and it cannot be ignored nor avoided.

Choices need to be made in order to keep up with the tides of change. One choice is simply maintenance, which is allowing the current state of life to suffice, while accepting the currents of change passively, as one is swept into obscurity. Another choice is to proactively and purposefully seek growth. This would require facing challenges as they come with great faith. Personally, the second choice is desirable and will demonstrate an individual’s passion for growth in godliness and the greatest influence for the Kingdom of God.

Nonetheless, in an effort to keep from presuming that everyone sees life in this light, here is a little picture regarding the necessity of proactively seeking growth and change.

When an athlete begins training to improve his or her athletic performance, it seems that minimal amounts of training are beneficial. Short and relatively easy workouts are all that is necessary for improvement. The reason this occurs, in very simple terms, is that untrained individuals have neural pathways and muscular systems that are akin to dirt roads. These dirt roads are rarely traveled and needing maintenance and improvements. The roads are inefficient and lack the quality necessary to function at a high level.

Providing minimal amounts of maintenance to these roads safeguards their quality and efficiency. But if an athlete is going to achieve goals that have been set, then more than maintenance must be done to accomplish these goals. What were once simple and short workouts become increasing complex as time passes. The athlete must constantly seek to find ways to improve neural pathways and muscular systems. As the athlete successfully improves these pathways and systems they become analogous to a four-lane highway. After much planning, adjusting, and work an athlete can successfully built up their dirt roads into highways that are more efficient, functional, and successful at achieving goals.

As time progresses and our athlete is faithful to train, the training needs to be more structured, specific, and tailored to fit the specific needs of the particular athlete, so that the greatest amount of success might be experienced. Again, in simplistic idiom, the maintenance and improvements on the neural and muscular systems have constructed this four-lane highway, thereby improving the functionality and quality of the roads. Nevertheless, even though the roads have improved, they still needs more work. So the maintenance and building of these roads need to be more structured, specific, and tailored to fit the demands of improvement.

Eventually, overtime, the athlete continues to modify, adjust, and change training schedules, eating habits, sleeping habits, along with numerous other factors seeking to achieve the best possible performance. What was once a dirt road, with ruts and holes in the neural and muscular pathways, has become a ten-lane superhighway engineered for the smoothest and most efficient travel. Through careful planning, needed adjustments, and purposeful execution of plans our athlete has succeeded and exceeded all expectations.

Change will come, and if maintenance is an individual’s goal then their impact for the Kingdom of God will be limited to bumping along unrefined dirt roads. Maintenance is nothing more than passively accepting what the tides of life bring.

Now, prayerfully, it is clear that this is a picture of the necessity of proactively seeking refinement and growth. I am fully aware that this example is lacking and deficient in many areas. Nevertheless, the nature of this little story is purposed to show how one must purposefully seek to mature. Growth in godliness will not occur via osmosis, but we must pursue personal holiness seeking to walk in the obedience of faith.

Change happens and when it does godliness is not passively accepting whatever comes, rather godliness is joyfully accepting the decrees of our Father and compatibly operating as responsible agents under the dominion of our Sovereign Lord. Christian, we must seek to give up childish ways and walk as mature children of God.

1 Corinthians 13:11—“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”