Towards a Life of Growth

Realigning my perspective

There is this sentiment that I often raise up to my colleagues and bosses at work, that our workday feels like a rocket launch. Everyday. Sometimes it’s a smaller, firework kind of impact, and sometimes it’s a launch to Mars.

When I said those things, it may feel as if I am begrudging the burden of growth. That there is never really a time to stop growing (I sometimes give it the name “rest and reflect” — but is it really so?), or that we are moving too slowly or too quickly, or that we are just running and running, waiting for our fuels to burn ourselves to the ground.

Many a times, yes.

But in totality, I may have missed out the true perspective of growth.

Today, as I was reading through a book that talks about the Supremacy of Christ in life by a group of Bible scholars*, I am reminded that even in my life as a person, I am not stopping in my growth.

How do I know this?

By just looking at history. Every day history is being made. Things are never finished. We never stop making choices, and mind you, daily choices, that determines our next step towards or further from our goals.

Knowing these things, in order to head towards the direction that I am set towards (say, for instance, towards sanctification, to be one day “like Christ”), I need to learn patience and scaling. Patience to not be shortsighted and to focus too much on just wanting to get to where I want to go, while forgetting the daily part of things, or vice versa. Scaling is to know where I am heading, and yet knowing that I have to make every choice of today to be significant towards that direction.

It’s always easy to put ourselves in black and white absolutes, “It’s either we’re here or we’re not.” But how about “We are from here to there, from oily rags to garden of delights.”*? And that requires patience and scaling.

In the end, growth is a lifelong learning and change process. What matters most about the life of growth is not so much the distance we’ve covered, or the speed in which we are going or the magnitude of a rocket launch, but it is in the direction we are heading towards, each and every day.*

And that, I dare say, is perhaps the better perspective of growth.

*Reference from “Sex and the Supremacy of Christ” by Desiring God ministries. It may seem a little offbeat, but in a particular chapter about restoring pure joy, the context there is talking about sanctification as a direction, which I thought apt to apply it to a bigger growth context as well.