Strange fact about growth…
Jul 26th, 2010 by ljkim
A popular meme from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers is that people who become experts in something had around 10,000 hours of practice in it. That sounds right because in our daily experience, it would be hard to do something for 10,000 hours and NOT get better at it. The first few days of a job can be difficult – even just remembering all the names of coworkers and where the post-its go, or learning the buttons on a cash register – but after around three and half (roughly 10,000 hours) of doing the exact same job, there might be something wrong if you did NOT get the hang of it. In fact if you weren’t capable of training other people to do your job after all that time, it would be strange… But a strange fact about spiritual growth is, it’s possible (perhaps because of sin) to spend years and years supposedly following Jesus, or having grown up an altar boy and Sunday schools – to know almost nothing…
So to a young church of early Christians, the author of Hebrews wrote: “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food”
Even people who are incredibly intelligent and talented in other areas find themselves in suspended animation when it comes to spiritual growth. Although it should only take a few years (three or so) to be a fully grown disciple, using one’s unique gifts and abilities, teaching others, raising other disciples, and living as fully functioning parts of Jesus’ body – this doesn’t seem to be happening.
Now this is NOT a guilt trip. But before you can do anything about something, you have to first diagnose the problem. If you remember what it was like to be a teenager, and young twenty something – you’d remember how hard some things were. It’s painful and confusing growing up. Perhaps the pain and confusion you’re experiencing now – albeit different kinds – is because spiritually you still need to grow up.
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