Slow Growth
How we focus by overlooking distractions
We operate much of the time on autopilot.
This is a useful ability.
Whether it is good or bad depends on the situation.
When we walk through our days in more or less routine ways we have the opportunity to grow, learn, and develop new skills and also develop new relationships and deepen older ones thanks to our autopilots. This is because we can focus our minds on one or two things while a million others are being managed without much thought through already established habit patterns. Hopefully the habits are good ones, but we all know this isn’t the case and why changing behavior isn’t easy.
Another day-spending option, and I’m speaking from personal experience here, is to not focus to learn and grow but just waste time. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at some open time in the future and told myself that I will use it to do something creative or important, only to completely fritter it away.
So what causes or enables us to change, grow, and improve besides our reliance on habits?
I believe there are at least two things.
The first is pain. Suffering awakens me to the absolute necessity to change my ways.
The second is repetition. Before any good behaviors can become natural they must be practiced. At first they feel foreign, but over time, eventually, they begin to feel second nature. That’s how habits are formed, slowly, over time, through repetition and a bit of discomfort.
It reminds me of the simple statement heard and repeated often in both AA and Al-Anon, “Keep coming back.” This simple idea of just returning to meet over and over results in changing from inebriated to sober and codependent to happy, joyous, and free.
The same is true about going to church. It doesn’t seem like much but over time it helps prepare us for the major tragedies connected to every life — loss, illness, and death.
Of course there are more reasons than inevitable future crisis management to go to church, but none more important.
For one thing church helps us gather with others who should, when trouble hits, become a big part of our support group. It is also how we learn to support and care for others - which is at least part of what God uses, along with suffering, to improve our characters and our lives.
Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God.
Honor everyone.
Love the brotherhood.
Fear God.
Honor the emperor.
Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.
For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure?
But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.
By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.
1 Peter 2:16-25 (ESV)
