Lopsided Growth

A lot is revealed about good and bad years when you examine the growth rings on a felled tree. The concentric circles have differing widths according to how much a tree has grown during particular years. They’re not all the same!You and I grow in spurts, too. Not every year adds the same amount of maturity or knowledge. Some years add more gray hairs or wrinkles than others! Some years go by in a hurry, while some years seem endless.Different areas of our lives grow at differing speeds, don’t they? Some of us learn organizational skills at an early age, while some are forever fighting to keep details under control. Some pick up cooking skills with ease, while some (see me raising my hand?) still manage to boil a pot of water dry after decades of cooking. I can think of lots of parts of my spiritual life I want to mature in. They include prayer, giving, fasting, Bible knowledge, and many more. I’ve got good maturity in some, while I’m a baby in a few and middle-aged in most. Some years my ‘growth rings’ in prayer, for instance, are wide (I learned a lot in those years), and sometimes they’re narrow.Patience, friends! Don’t assume that a person mature in Bible knowledge or prayer or some other area is equally mature in tithing or helping the needy. If we could only see each other’s growth rings!