Growing Up

"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness....." --A certain Galilean

I've recently been thinking about my own relationship with God. The state of my spirituality. Theologically speaking, I've been pondering sanctification.

For probably as long as I've been a Christian, I have thought about the kind of person I want to be. The kind of person I need to be. The kind of person who really lives out their faith in love every moment of every day.

Yet most of the time, it seems I'm nowhere near where I should be.

Sometimes people tell me I am being too hard on myself. Perhaps they're right. But then sometimes I think I'm not being hard enough.

Growing close to God and becoming a more spiritually focused Christian believer are important goals for me. It is my fervent hope that I could become a person whose first recourse is prayer, whose first thoughts are of God, whose spirit is infused not with my own wants and desires, but His. I need my relationship with God to make a real difference in the kind of person I am. The kind of person I am continually becoming.

Trouble is, sometimes I wonder whether I'm making any progress at all. Whether I am really growing closer to Christ. Whether I am being transformed into the person God wants me to be.

Because more often than not, I find myself making the same mistakes time and again. Failing here, there, and everywhere and never being the loving soul I wish I were.

I suspect I am not alone in this.

It's tough to have to admit that we fall short so often. That our highest ideals and hopes for serving God and others so often get waylaid.

All the same, I cannot help but believe that if we are really seeking after God and asking His help, our lives will somehow become something different. They just have to. I don't know--maybe it's not something I can see now, at 25 years of age. Maybe it's something one simply has to look back on after many years. I'm not sure.

So ya, we'll mess up...believe me, I know that as much as any. But maybe, just maybe, we'll fail less often. Maybe we'll realize the consequences quicker and learn love more naturally.

And maybe, slowly but surely, steadily but sometimes imperceptibly, we really will begin to forge ahead with a stronger relationship with God. At the very least, this is what I am going to be praying.

Because I think it's when we stop caring, when we stop struggling...it's then that we're in the most trouble.