by Kathryn Schuyler
I remember as a kid having a constant desire to grow taller. It was a contest – my grandma would line us up with a ruler on the crown of our heads, marking our heights carefully in pencil on her scuffed yellow wall. It wasn’t about who was the tallest (my older cousin had that one in the bag). It was about who had grown the fastest since the last Thanksgiving, last Easter.
When it comes to spiritual growth, measurement should happen pretty much the same way. It’s not about which community group member is the farthest along on their faith journey, or how our spiritual gift stats stack up against the rest of the church. At Makers, and in churches around the world, we’re working on our spiritual elasticity, to stretch the small versions of ourselves into someone deeper and more vast, and to snap closer to Jesus.
Paul teaches in Hebrews 5 about spiritual adulting – “Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.“
By Paul’s definition, there are baby Christians who drink milk, there are grown-up Christians who eat solid food, and by extension, there are probably kiddo Christians who eat Cheetos and teenage Christians who eat Jack-N-The-Box tacos, but Paul didn’t feel the need to delve into that much detail. The point is, the Church, scripture, and Jesus meet everyone exactly where they’re at and grow from there. And that growth, the maturity Paul refers to, comes from “constant use“ of these resources. It comes from taking a bite of something you can’t chew and just chewing.
That’s the idea behind Grow Track at Makers. Regardless of your stage of spiritual development, or regardless of if you even know what that means, the leaders at Makers are here to meet you where you’re at. With stories from their own lives, with the living, breathing Word of God that transforms at the touch, with personality tests and reflective questions and discussion opportunities, we know this isn’t where your journey begins or ends. It’s where it continues.
Grow Track is a four-week, low-commitment practice of chewing. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to share your thoughts and questions with people you barely know when you’d rather be brunching. Let’s call those growing pains.
Because growth only comes when you press in, despite the pain it takes to feel your shin bones stretching—you will get taller. This time next year you will look back at your pencil mark on the wall and how far you’ve come, thinking I can’t believe all that I couldn’t see then, that I can see now. Your distance from Jesus will shrink. Your capacity to ask will expand. You will come ever closer to the person God made you to be from the beginning. And you won’t be able to wait for your next bite.
*Join us with Grow Track. Directly following the 10 AM gathering at Dana Middle School.