Slow Growth
Well, it’s nearly springtime. I love the spring and planting season. It’s almost time to start thinking about my spring and summer garden. I absolutely LOVE gardening, and I’ve learned so many practical spiritual lessons from it. One such lesson is that of slow growth and gradual progress.
Like a plant, I should always be growing. Sometimes growth is slow and not as noticeable though. It’s often only detected in hindsight.
Consider a plant…
Most of the time, when I go out and look at my garden every day, I rarely notice a significant difference in size from one day to the next. It’s a slow growth that is unnoticeable without a time-lapse camera or video. However, if I look at the plant just every now and then and then think back to that same plant a month ago, I can definitely see a difference in size and growth. The same is true if I were to take a picture and then compare the plant to a month old (or more) picture of that same plant.
We usually can’t see the growth as it’s happening. It’s only in hindsight and retrospection that we can observe some of the progress.
Consider kids growing…
I don’t notice my kids growing from day to day. I can look at them each and every morning and they look exactly the same to me. However, if a friend or family member who hasn’t seen them in a while sees them, they always comment on how much they’ve grown.
This past school year my son went up 4 sizes in clothes all in one year! We even had to buy him new baseball pants and cleats midseason because he outgrew the others just since the start of the season. He was quite obviously growing. I just didn’t notice it daily. It’s a slow growth process. Though my bank account might not have considered it too slow having to buy new clothes so often!