Walking with no Applause

Our granddaughter, who just a month ago was taking only a few tentative steps before falling on her well-diapered bottom, is now toddling around everywhere.  After every long trek she makes, the family will clap and cheer for her.  My husband will then loudly complain (with tongue firmly in cheek) that he has been walking for years and nobody is making a fuss over him!

While he’s not really expecting any kudos for his ability to walk from point A to point B, his joke made me think about how we can sometimes be as Christians.

When you were first converted, you took lots of tentative steps as you learned and grew.  Sometimes you fell, but if you are still serving God today, that means you stood back up and tried again.  In those early days, in your own mind, success may have been measured by those things that you stopped doing. No longer were you living in the sin that held you captive before.  If you were always out partying the world’s way, you found yourself celebrating in the house of God.  Instead of engaging in a string of illicit relationships, you began cultivating a relationship with Jesus.  If you were struggling with substance abuse, you started partaking of what the Bible calls the “new wine”.  Everything was different. People saw the changes in your life and were drawn to the God who transformed your life so radically.  Those who were close to you constantly encouraged you to stay strong and continue walking this new path.

Then some time passes.  People become accustomed to you living a “moral” life.  Those you have met while you have been on this spiritual journey have never seen the person you were before.  There are no cheerleaders celebrating the fact that you are still walking.  What do you do then?  You do what you should have done all along.  It was never about the praise and approval of others.  It was always about pleasing the God who gave you new life in the first place.

Colossians 1:9-10  For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; ¹⁰ that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God…

When nobody is noticing your growth in the Lord, keep growing.  In a few months, Bella’s walking will not be a new thing in our household.  I doubt we will still be commenting every time she walks across a room.  Instead, we’ll be celebrating each new milestone she reaches.  Even that will stop after a while.  She will grow to be an adult and she will set goals for herself and reach them.  Some of those goals will not even be things we know about.  She will achieve them, and she will grow and change on her own.  She won’t need our constant approval, and neither should we need the approval of man.  We should move on from glory to glory, always desiring to please God and become the instrument in His hands that He will use to do Kingdom business.