Andrew Ticknor's Blog
Spiritual Growth / 06.02.09, 11:24 AM
I have always been frustrated with the image of the spiritual life being a roller coaster, however I have often found it to be the most realistic way of describing my life. This year I have discovered new, richer, more fulfilling pictures of what the spiritual life is, or at least has been to me. I feel like my life has been so up and down, so cyclic. I feel like I struggle with so many of the same things that I have struggled with for so long and that no matter how long I seem to thrive or be in a “good” place that I always end up in similar lows. It is very frustrating to me and I long to reach some sort of continually upward growth or some heavenly plateau. Last week at Bible study at our church, Emily, who was leading, talked about how often times spiritually we take 2 steps forward and then 1 step back. She was telling us how this is often not even intentional, us knowingly taking steps backward or regressing, but that we just become aware of ways that we have been off course, ways that we are not as far along as we would like to think, ways that pride, greed, lust and envy have snuck into our lives. I was thinking about the ups and downs of my life, the different reasons that I am frustrated by setbacks. I think there are two different types of setbacks or steps back, one of those being good and even necessary and the other one being bad and the source of a lot of frustration with myself. The first type is what I just mentioned, the awareness of our unintentional regression, the awareness of new ways that our lives are off the mark, what I have found is the deeper I get in my faith, the more closer and deeper the issues come to my heart. Instead of just focusing on not being mean or releasing my anger on people, I am faced with the hidden bitterness and hatred in my heart which no one sees or knows of. The second type of setback, the one that annoys me is the mistakes that I continually make, when I don’t learn from things and I continue to do things, knowing what the end result will be, knowing that I don’t want to act a certain way or be a certain type of person. It frustrates me when I am this way and when I feel like I am going back in time and not growing and learning from my mistakes. I think that I am coming to a place where I am thankful for the way I have become the person I am because of many of the sins and mistakes of my past, not glad that I did certain things or that certain things happened in my life, but joyful for the way I have grown and learned from them. I know that as I live my life I will continually sin, make mistakes and take steps backward, however with each of these incidents I am faced with the opportunity to learn and grow and take steps forward or to revert back to ways I have been and to let those setbacks immobilize me. This year we had a Mission Year training in which Jimmy McGee brought a labyrinth and used it as an image of the spiritual life for us. I feel like this image is a much more useful image for me, compared to the roller coaster image. With a labyrinth, there is movement, there is journey, the path is path to the center and then back out from the center, at times you can be close to the center, yet in terms of the path, very far from actually being at the center. As I was contemplating this image, I thought a better image would be some sort of multi-level labyrinth. Instead of thinking merely of spiritual growth as something linear and 2D, it is so much deeper than that, something 3D or even beyond that. We often go in different directions, but all the time, it is a search, a journey, we are never stagnant, we are always either growing or dying, even if we are doing nothing, and as I have heard described, not only is our journey inward to find our center, we also journey outward back into the world. I love this concept and its correlation for us as Christians. As we grow spiritually, as our eyes are opened, as we deepen in our understanding of God and our faith, it cannot be separated from the world in which we find ourselves, from our praxis, the way our lives are lived and our involvement in the world often is a primary way in which we are formed spiritually. This new way of viewing spiritual growth has been helpful to me as I continue on this amazing, confusing, beautiful, heart-breaking and always interesting journey which is life.
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