We live in an instant-gratification culture. We have generally come to expect immediate returns on our investments of time and resources. It is not surprising that we, as members of an instant-gratification culture, tend to become impatient with any process of development that requires of us more than a limited involvement of our time and energies. Often our spiritual quest becomes a search for the right technique, the proper method, the perfect program that can immediately deliver the desired results of spiritual maturity and wholeness. We do not expect to put an infant into its crib at night and in the morning find a child, an adolescent or yet an adult. We expect that infant to grow into maturity according to the processes that God has ordained for physical growth to wholeness. The same thing is true of our spiritual life.
For a while we may live on a plateau of life and relationship with God. Then one of those moments comes in which we experience a growth spurt and find ourselves on a new level of life and relationship with God. We experience God in a new and different way. But if we mistake such a growth spurt for all these is in spirituality, then we are not prepared for the long haul toward spiritual wholeness.
What we don't realize is that often a period of apparent spiritual stagnation, a time in which we don't feel as if we are going anywhere, a phase of life in which our relationship with God seems weak or nonexistent, the time of dryness, of darkness -- what the mothers and fathers of the church speak of as the desert experience -- is filled with nurturing down below the surface that we never see. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results. This hidden work of God is a nurturing that prepares us for what appears to be a quantum leap forward. What we see as the quantum leap may actually be only the smallest part of what has been going on in a long, steady process of grace, working far beyond our knowing and understanding, to bring us to that point where we are ready for God to move us into a new level of spiritual awareness and a new depth of wholeness in relationship with God in Christ. There simply is no instantaneous event of putting your quarter in the slot and seeing spiritual formation drop down where you can reach it, whole and complete.
We fail to realize that the process of spiritual shaping is a primal reality of human existence. EVERYONE is in a process of spiritual formation! We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image -- destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenness upon them. We become either agents of God's healing and liberating grace or carriers of the sickness of the world. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other. Spiritual formation is not an option!
Excerpt from Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.
