In the midst of camps, conferences, sports days, and lots of emails and everyday issues, we find ourselves struggling to heed Dallas Willard's advice to "ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life."  

Not because productivity is bad, but because we have a tendency to lose sight of the bigger things when the tyranny of the urgent presses around us.  

And sometimes the bigger things are actually the smaller things.  

Like our own growth.  

It is tempting when you work in an exotic setting or vocation (think: pastor, missionary, working for a nonprofit), to imagine that our commitment to a cause is more important or at least more significant, than the hum-drum things like growing better.

What that often conceals though, is our own lack of growth. 
And we dare not confuse accomplishment with personal growth.

Your accomplishments you will leave behind, you are stuck with yourself. 

There is a human tendency, which I have not yet found a remedy for, to always seek to find a position of relative security and strength from which to do something impressive.  

I call this plateauing.

We instinctively have a goal in mind, usually one we are confident we can reach, and when we achieve it, we look for how we can shift from striving, to maintaining the status quo.    

This is because growth is so hard.  

I just celebrated my 32nd birthday.  (That sounds old just writing it!)  

My body is certainly aging, but how is my soul maturing (the person I am)?

Would I like the me I am becoming if I continued on my present course?  

Would anyone else?

Joshua dispatching one of several Cobras at our office... 

The plateau is a myth.

 Life is moving, like time. You can't stand still, you are becoming something.  

If you are not changing, or don't think you are, you are probably not growing.

Many of us fall prey to a sense of having already arrived.
We call our lack of change and growth "consistency."

But this is in itself a kind of arrogance.  "Since I already have all the right things, since I already am a good person, it is enough to just continue doing what I have been doing."  

It is so easy to fall into the good-enough trap.

"Aren't there people worse than me?"  

"Aren't I better than most people?"

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to identify the faults of others than our own?  

Or how much easier it is to focus on a task, or accomplishment, or project, than on our own heart?

The plateau offers plenty of projects, that don't really ask anything beyond our current abilities.  

The mountain calls us to keep climbing.

It calls us beyond what we are comfortable with, beyond what we are currently capable of.

In contrast, the plateau offers the false security of business as usual, the familiar.

The same old ways.
The same old methods.
The same old results.

But what if the chief reason you are where you are, is not so you can accomplish something, 
but so that you might become something?

There is no retirement from growth. We are all becoming something.  The only question is, what. 

Are your choices hindering or helping your growth?  

Are you choosing the easy way?  

Are you choosing the 'don't rock the boat,' don't offend anyone, way?

Are you choosing the 'play it safe,' don't risk a good thing for a better, way?

There is no plateau, you are going up or down, getting better or getting worse. 

 And the struggle is the greatest of your life, the enemy is within and without!  And it is precisely this struggle that we want to avoid.  I don't know about you, but I like it when things go smoothly.  

But if we are honest, we know that isn't where we usually grow. 

It's when the stuff hits the fan, when stuff falls apart, when people betray and mistreat us, when our carefully laid plans are laid waste.  Then we get to see something of what we really are.  And God's chief concern is not what we can do or accomplish, (people are impressed with that, but God knows better) but God is concerned with who or what, we really are and are becoming.

God doesn't deal in fictions, only in truth.

There is a point to life: to become fit for more and more life, until life utterly drowns out death.