Don’t you enjoy watching things grow? You follow the growth of a watermelon morning after morning. You watch a sunflower pop up and eventually grow a big head. You watch your new puppy get bigger and heavier and eat more and more until you wonder if the family budget can afford him!
It’s all God’s work, of course. Creation continues. God saw what God had created after six days, called it very good and took a day of rest. And then creation continued! And creation continues in faraway and nearby places. On our vacation out west, Kay and I saw amazing geologic phenomenon such as the geysers in Yellowstone and the “hoodoos” in Bryson’s Canyon National Park. (Google it. Words cannot describe hoodoos.)
New steam vents and bubbling mud pots suddenly show themselves in Yellowstone. Hundreds of thousands of young trees are springing up to replace the ones destroyed in the horrific fires of a few years ago. Change and growth is all around you.
And the stars! New stars are being birthed in our galaxy and around the universe all the time!
But most of that growth is slow – hard to follow unless you live ten thousand years – and distant, too! You can’t literally watch veggies and flowers grow. They’re too slow. Trees grow slowly. And we can’t head over to Yellowstone for the afternoon. Nor can we visit the nebulae which are the nurseries of new stars.
But then we have young people! And what a privilege it is for adults of all ages to watch them grow and mature. Maybe you can’t see a fifteen year old grow literally overnight, but some of them sure seem to! And it’s not just physical growth I’m thinking of, but the more substantial maturation of children and teens into adults who are fully alive and serving God and world as led by Christ.
Where is the greenhouse where we can observe this taking place among our young people? Well it’s at church, of course! And we not only can watch them grow; we can participate in the process! The rest of us, through prayer, through teaching, through modeling of the Christian life and through financial support of staff, can keep the growth process moving along. And we also get to watch it take place!
One of the early saints said “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” That development, that growth, takes place in the incubator called “the Church.” I’ll see you in the nursery next Sunday!
Paul