April 4, 2011

Good Morning,

April 1^st my young grandson matured to the “ripe young age” of SIX.  He had spent most of his young life just waiting to be SIX.  I’m not sure I remember my sixth birthday, but I do remember turning sixteen.  That is when I got my driver’s license, dated for the first time, graduated from high school, went away from home for the first time to college and met my husband.  During the four years that followed my sixteenth birthday, I really felt like I was “grown.”  I even got married at age nineteen, the summer before my senior year in college.  Can you believe that?  After completing my last year of college (as a “married lady” mind you) and graduating from college, I joined my husband, landed my first job in inner city Cleveland, Ohio, started our family and began to discover what “real” life was all about, what it really meant to be “grown.”  This was when the great rude awakening came.  In no time at all, I admitted that I had a lot more learning and growing up to do to be really prepared and equipped to face the REAL adult world. 

Fifty-one years later I realize that when I thought I had become “grown” at the tender age of sixteen, I had not even begun to tap into what being “grown” was all about.  These days when parents offer children advice they often reply, “I’m grown now.”  (something I never quite had the nerve to say to my parents), even after I was well past, what I called, being “grown.”  As I watched Stevie in his excitement about being SIX, I couldn’t help but reminisce a bit, while also imagining the various stages he would experience during each decade until he would see the number SIX again. The next ten years he could count on his little fingers seemed like an eternity to him now.

I know now that I was also spiritually a neophyte “back in the day” when I thought I had it all together.  Handling life’s tee-bone steaks is hard.  Aside from not being able to afford it, I barley knew what steak tasted like, having grown up in a family with very modest means.  I can’t even remember when I had my first steak now.  As we develop we move from milk to strained baby food, then to junior foods or simple foods from the family table (cut up of mashed up so we could digest them), then to eating what adults eat.  Sometimes we have to go back to the previous stage until we are ready for the next.  When our systems are mature enough, we are able to eat and easily digest solid foods, including tee bone steaks.  This developmental process is perhaps the most important part of God’s masterful plan and design for our bodies, minds and souls as He prepares us to be used by Him.  By the time we reach adulthood we are expected to be able, not only to make proper selections and digest the food and other things we put into our systems, but we are also expected to function as mature adults and not like immature children.  Paul puts it this way.  ”… though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 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. Hebrew 5:12-14.  In other words, we empty ourselves of childish things (the milk and baby food) to make room for the tee bone steaks.  Spiritual maturity must take place in order to live our healthy “new lives” in a way that is pleasing and acceptable to God. 

Then and only then can we light the path for others that leads to Him.  By allowing God to develop each stage of my “digestive system” by emptying myself, I am learning to just take one day at a time and smell the roses along the way, while appreciating the sweet smell of rain, as well as basking in the warmth of sunshine, all the time looking forward to the next SIX in my life, and the next, and the next and the next … How is God preparing you for the next SIX in your life?   How’s your steak?  I love you.  abp