If you’ve ever felt like you are going in circles, in cycles, in seasons, it’s because you are. We live a life of rhythms. Day easing its burdens into the cool dark of night, sun slipping lazily in the sky. And darkness giving way to dawn break and the rising hope of new mornings.
Our growth isn’t linear, it’s circular.
It bends back on itself and overlaps in loops and swirls and curves. We aren’t marching forward on a timeline so much as we’re adding rings to our core like aged oak, firming up roots, breaking bark raw like shedding skins, limbs reaching and stretching and yearning for light.
There are droughts and rings like slivers, scratching out our captivity like hash marks on a prisoner’s wall. There are monsoons when we soak up the earth and we drink so deeply and everything expands.
Children dance in soppy wet puddles and you see a bit of miracle in the aftermath when the storm clouds tuck themselves back into bright blue skies, because you’re still standing. The sun comes back out and people find you because you provide shade and a soft place to escape the scorch and blister of the growing years.
And then there are our ordinary days and those make you doubt growth the most. Because the world expects you to grow forward, march down a timeline. Do more, be more, have more.
You have traded in your beater car for an SUV, your one-bedroom apartment and a roommate for a four-bedroom house with walk-in closets situated in a nice neighborhood with good schools. We are a culture of upgrades, always moving forward, moving upward.
But God is not about upward mobility so much as inward expansion. God’s Kingdom lives in the ever widening rings, the core and the hollows. God’s Kingdom growth mostly happens on ordinary days.
