The Gift of Growing Pains

When my now six-foot-two son was growing up, he experienced what the doctor called “growing pains.” During multiple appointments, the medical staff couldn’t prove that growing hurts and/or find physical concerns to explain the aching. However, my son’s leg pain was real. We did what we could to bring him relief but, sometimes, all we could do was comfort and encourage him while he . . . grew.

Any growth requires change, and change is often painful. God’s people are not exempt from this reality of life—physically or spiritually. When we’re serving the Lord in close contact with others, growing pains ache when someone “rubs us the wrong way” or vice versa. Ignoring the hurt or avoiding the culprit can lead to more pain and even division. If our goal is to be active members of a biblically diverse church that is fulfilling the Great Commission while living out the Great Commandment, growing pains cannot be avoided.

After I joined a committee to help search for our new pastor, God revealed how He can minimize casualties of the inevitable physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual growing pains we experience as members of His family.

When selecting the members who would serve on the search committee, our leadership intentionally chose men and women who represented the demographics of our church and the community we served. We had different personalities, different ways of communicating, and different experiences that impacted our decision-making processes. We were from different cultures and economic statuses. We even asked a high school senior to represent our youth. But, we understood that the God-given differences that made us unique as a church family also set us up for miscommunications and conflict. So, before we reviewed the first application, our team prayed together and set some ground rules.

We committed to being prayerful, to honoring God’s Word above all, and to loving one another in all circumstances. We promised to be respectful, honest, and compassionate as we worked together, especially when we didn’t agree. We stuck to our process, from the development of the job description through every step of every interview.

Everything ran smoothly . . . until it didn’t.

When we got off track, even a little bit, the disagreements hurt feelings and caused frustrations. At various times, God spoke through different members of our diverse team, which we started to call a family instead of a committee. As we prayed, the Holy Spirit brought us back in alignment with Him and each other. Our votes were always unanimous, and our meetings always ended in peace. If you’ve ever been on any committee, you know that alone was a miracle!

After the two-year mark, however, a misunderstanding almost led to the breakdown of our group. When the discussion reached its boiling point, the Spirit stepped in and moved me to say, “We need to pray!” After that prayer, we were able to clear up the miscommunication, refocusing on Jesus and our shared goal as we honored our agreed upon process. Though the experience was hard, our team was stronger and more confident after that conflict.

This isn’t just a modern issue. In Ephesians 4, the apostle Paul addresses the growing pains of a community of believers who have experienced the challenges of working together to fulfill God’s purpose. The apostle calls believers in Jesus to “live a life worthy of the calling [we] have received” (v. 1). He encourages us to be “completely humble and gentle” and tells us to “be patient, bearing with one another in love” (v. 2). His language reflects the inevitability of challenges while living in community. Christ-followers fight against every desire of our flesh, which bends toward self-centered gratification; instead, we follow Christ’s example as we serve selflessly and sacrificially together.

How do we do this when everyone is different from us?

We remember we’re on the same team with the same end goal. Paul said we are to make “every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (v. 3). Paul’s directions prove he understands the complications that occur when we’re seeking to fulfill the charge of harmonious teamwork focused on shared purpose. So, the apostle encourages believers to rely on the Spirit, who is the only One who can enable us to rise against our fleshly desire to go our own way. Every word we say (or don’t say), every attitude we express (or don’t), and every action we take (or don’t) should reflect our commitment to God’s Kingdom advancement and lead us to be unified within our God-given diversity.

Scripture affirms, from Genesis to Revelation, that our Triune God desires the relational unity and Spirit empowerment of His people. We are “one body” that He intentionally made up of many vastly different people who He enables through “one Spirit” and secures by “one hope” (v. 4). We are to live exclusively devoted to “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” with our hearts surrendered to “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (vv. 5–6). In His glorious goodness, the Son affirms He is God above all who provides the Spirit as God in all. He entrusts each one of us with gifts that are valuable and essential to the development of His Kingdom (vv. 7–9). He never intended for us to hoard His gifts, use them for self-gratification, or taint them with selfish motives.

All God-given gifts come with responsibility to the Giver of all good things and require total reliance on the Holy Spirit. This is why Jesus poured grace into “the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers,” who “equip [His] people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” (vv. 11–12). Building up signifies the change necessary for spiritual maturity. However, a sign of spiritual maturity is an awareness of the process being a lifelong endeavor. Our development of full Christlike character will not be obtained this side of eternity. So, the Spirit provides opportunities to flex our faith-muscles—demonstrate our love for Him through obedience to His Word, and work together in all our brokenness and beautiful diversity. The joy is in the journey, which will continue “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (v. 13).

Spiritual maturity is not a single destination, but an ongoing adventure of walking with God by faith, seeking to know Him intimately, accepting the inevitability of growing pains, and experiencing peace during character-refining trials. The more we know Christ’s unchanging character, demonstrated and defined through His infallible and immutable Word, the deeper our faith will become. Deeper faith can help us stay united when faced with difficult trials. Paul said, that when we reach that point, “we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (vv. 14–15).

The road toward spiritual maturity includes ongoing growing pains we cannot see, but we’ll definitely feel. However, when we confess our sins, admit our need for the Spirit’s power, and submit to His authority, we can exchange our self-centered desires for a life-long dedication to pleasing Him above all else. Connected to Christ, “the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament,” which simply means the Church embracing its beautiful diversity, “grows and builds itself up in love, as each part,” or member, “does its work” (v. 16). According to Jesus, our work is to fulfill the Great Commission while living out the Great Commandment, tasks that can only be done by His beautifully diverse and purposefully connected family.

Looking back now on my time with the Pastor Search Committee, I see why every disagreement led to us praying together. Those prayers led us back down the road to peace, unity, and hope grounded in and motivated by our love for God. With each prayer, we proclaimed our love for each other, our church family, our future pastor, and the community we’d be serving together was more important than getting our way or being right. Before we dispersed as a committee, we realized we’d grown closer as a family. God had changed all of us through the process, but not without growing pains.

Over two and a half years after we began meeting weekly, we welcomed our new pastor and his family. Together, we’re supporting his leadership and working to maintain a church culture that celebrates diversity and inclusion. As individuals and a church family, we’ve already experienced growing pains. Words have been miscommunicated and misunderstood. Feelings have been hurt. Fear of change has caused conflict.

However, we can look back on God’s past faithfulness to our church family, one of the only multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural congregations in our area. God has proven that He can empower us to live in unity within our diversity, as we focus on His Kingdom advancement. We are dedicated to knowing and following Jesus. We meet for prayer consistently. We are committed to communicating instead of gossiping. Until we fall short, which is expected. So, when we need to work through our differences, someone will remind us to pause, pray, and pivot.

You, too, are a valued member of God’s family. You, too, are gifted and called to work in unity with those who are different from you. Together, we can prayerfully focus on working together to fulfill the Great Commission and live out the Great Commandment. We can ask the Holy Spirit to help us pause to reflect on His past faithfulness. We can pray for reminders of His trustworthiness. And we can praise Him for the gift of our purposeful growing pains, which prove He hasn’t given up on working in and through us day by day.

How have you witnessed God using growing pains to deepen your relationships with Him and others?

–Written Xochitl Dixon. Used by permission from the author.