BIRTHDAYS! This week I celebrate my birthday. As I get older, I tend to find myself both being excited and honestly dreading my birthday every year. When you’re growing up, birthdays are exciting! It is a time to celebrate, to see friends and family, and is a celebration of another year of growth. It seems like the older I get, the more I stop seeing the growth that I am celebrating. You see, birthdays are a cool milestone marking another year of growth, but it is easy to lose sight of this.
This week during my devotion time, I was reading about how we aren't done growing yet. This is such an encouraging statement. As a kid, I wanted to grow up quickly. I wanted to hurry up and be able to be an adult, make my own decisions, become a mom… all kinds of different things. I had my own idea of what that would look like, but I wanted to grow up. Now, I notice that it is harder to have the mindset of being excited for another year of growing. I am constantly amazed at how far I have come and blown away at how old I am getting.
There is, however, a difference in the growth I experience in my body and in my spirit. My body will eventually stop growing, hit a peak, and start this downward spiral, but that’s not how spiritual growth works. My relationship with Christ never stops growing. I am fairly young, but my relationship with Christ has come a long way. Together, we have been through a lot of different ups and downs, but there is hope in the fact that God continuously chooses to grow me. God chooses me to be a part of HIS master plan. I know that I have grown exponentially within this last year. God keeps choosing to pick up the broken pieces of my life and rebuild them stronger than I could have ever imagined.
As I look at what this new year is going to look like in my life - my relationship with Christ, school, work, and socially - I know that I have a lot of growing left to do. One of the most encouraging things about my birthday, is that it marks another year of getting to work at looking more like Christ. This year, as I start this next chapter of my life, I am going to choose to look at it as a milestone marking how far I've grown with Christ and how much further I get to go with Him.
Are you willing to look at growing up or having a birthday, as an opportunity to grow with Christ? That's the question I'm asking myself this week.
