Growing Pains

Exodus 32:6 ESV

And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

Growing pains are a phenomenon when the body grows so fast that it is in physical pain. The reality of this physiological experience has become a metaphor for many different things in the lives of people and institutions. When they are growing so fast that things and people once enjoyed have to be “let go” because they can’t fit. In my childhood there was even a TV show, “Growing Pains' ', hashing out the comedic and painful moments that come in the life of a family when it must “grow-up”.

The people of God face moments when they are tempted to revert to childishness. When they want the comforts of a child. The nostalgia that comes with knowing how the game is played. The Israelites understood that to worship they needed and image, once they had an image, they knew that worship of a God of the harvest would be a sexual act, so “they rose up to play”. This was the desire to fall back into the childish worship they had been raised around. They had grown to resemble the culture they lived in more than the man they owed their lineage to. They had grown but they had not matured. They had multiplied but they had not been tempered by the faith of Abraham.

The people of God must give up childish ways. We are reared as children in a society adverse to the preaching of God’s word, and that is true in EVERY decade. For Christians to mature we must embrace the mature faith. Part of the growing pains of every generation of Christians is what to do with the suffering that must take place. Do they run from it and rise to play, or do they put the hand to the plow? Samuel Rutherford in reflecting on the suffering of his life said “But since I find furniture, armor and strength from the consecrated Captain, the Prince of our salvation, who was perfected through suffering, I esteem suffering for Christ a king’s life.”

He chose to see his suffering as God sees it. Not as a trial to be overcome but as a joyful part of maturing in the image of his elder brother. If he was to attain to the perfection (maturing) of his brother he too must endure. As Augustine noted “God had one son without sin, but never one without suffering.” Maturing in the Christian way, in a culture walking the broad way to hell, requires vocabulary, habits, and lives lived uncomfortably suffering for neighbors and relatives.

Taking joy in the moment you get behind the wheel license in hand, is a scary moment if you have not prepared. It is easy to get annoyed, frustrated, and angry with all that can and does go wrong as you try and learn. It is easy to get annoyed, frustrated, and angry when everything starts to break, from the car, the house, and eventually the knees. Maturing into the likeness of our elder brother tells us we are to “rejoice in our sufferings” (Romans 5:3), because it shows God’s love for us.

I have to constantly be reminded that those “sufferings” are a show of God’s love for me. Even then my wicked heart wants to fall back into childish complaints and whining.

Coram Deo