A better you?
on growing pains and glory
A better you, every day. Isn’t that the standard to aim for? After all, doesn’t the apostle Paul say in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that “we all … are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory” — so how cool is that? A day-by-day, perhaps even moment-by-moment, growing into the likeness of Jesus. Every part of your personality and character being worked on and re-shaped, the ground progressively cleared and the tender shoots cultivated into luscious, fruit-bearing greenery.
But is that really how to read this verse? Many do so and then find what ought to be a thrill turns into a threat — a statement of acclaim morphs into accusation. Because an honest account of our lives reads so very differently. Things are far from straightforward. Which part of you is it that’s to be better than it was the day before? Is it to be true in every habit, every motivation, every relationship? Is there no possibility for regression in any of those areas — that we are once changed, always changed? Is Paul really suggesting the curve of the Christian life is only ever upwards? If he is — and it does get presented that way — then many of us are, quite simply, falling woefully short. Because that is not the path our pilgrimage has taken.
There’s clearly something wrong here, if so many could feel so silently defeated by what is designed to be a statement that declares truth to the glory of God. I think there are at least two things to say which might help set this on a sounder footing.
The first is to acknowledge the reality of what growth actually looks and feels like. You might remember those awkward days of adolescence, when growing pains felt like a permanent part of life. Your bones and muscles often felt sore and your body disproportionate and uncoordinated. Would you never outgrow being the gawky teenager? The growth was clear, but it often felt destabilising.
And yet, looking back, you can see that the pains you suffered were the signature of the process. There was no smooth upward curve into adulthood, into fuller physical or psychological formation, nor could there be. And yet we expect precisely that in relationship with the Lord?
So take a breath. Just as in your youth, you are becoming a different person — just not yet fully-formed. Sometimes it’s difficult to discern the precise shape it’s taking and how the finished article (you) will look. You have to hang on in there while the work continues. As with the adolescent, we’re growing towards the adulthood that is already within us — a final likeness to Jesus, superintended by “the Lord who is the Spirit.”
Then, secondly, we need to widen the narrative in order to take proper account of the picture Paul is actually painting in this verse. Fundamentally he isn’t delineating the individual Christian in these lines — this is about the church as a community, as a family. He is describing in these celebrated words a corporate growth and transformation that pulses with the glory of God.
Maybe you have an even harder time seeing the progression there than you do in your personal experience? You wouldn’t be alone in that.
Often there is friction born of misunderstandings, some of them apparently wilful. There is tension across and within the body. The church family is becoming more diverse and that can bring with it awkwardness and a sense of loss, as the body begins to shed the identity with which you were comfortable. So much change and so little ease.
But, as with the gangly teenager, struggling every time they look in the mirror, some of these tensions will be, in themselves, the evidence of genuine growth. If we can set down the progress chart for a moment, realising we’re intent on measuring the wrong things entirely, that our metric is not of the Lord, might we not see that the body is made up of people with vastly different backgrounds, life experiences and more — and yet the direction of travel is Christ-wards?
Yes, the individual trajectories are uneven and sometimes appear to be regressive, and that bleeds over into the corporate narrative. But learning to live together and cope with the vagaries is akin to our younger bodies somehow managing to navigate the awkward middle years towards physical maturity. And so the forgiving and being forgiven, the patience and the burden-bearing, shine with the glory of God far more compellingly because the context is one of confusion and clumsiness.
Some day (to switch metaphors), the whole house will be filled with the glory of God. At the moment, it can feel like a building site, with rubble everywhere, rooms unfinished and endless delays due to poor weather. It takes a lot of faith to imagine what it will be one day!
But isn’t that faith also a display of the glory of God? That we do not lose heart, not with ourselves nor with others, because our hope isn’t located in our own faltering efforts, nor our expectations governed by the passing fads of this mercurial world. Instead, standing shoulder to shoulder we turn our gaze and “with unveiled faces [we] contemplate the Lord’s glory”. And it is that sight which is the motive power for every movement towards the goal, the upward call of God in Christ.
So don’t lose heart. The change is happening and it will be completed. Let’s give him the glory for that.
