Avoiding Painful Growth

I’m a goal freak. I love to push myself in a lot of facets of my life. I love to create benchmarks for myself and then destroy those benchmarks. But I have a problem. I only like to grow in the areas that I’m passionate about. I’m not really into people speaking up about areas where they see the potential for growth if I didn’t first ask. Because if I’m the one who’s asking, chances are, I already want to grow in that area anyway. For the most part, I also try to avoid growing in places that I don’t feel very good at to begin with. Public speaking comes to mind (as I’m sure it does with a lot of us).

In his book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis uses the image of a man with a nasty creature that has grown to become a part of the man. He knows it shouldn’t be there, he knows he can remove it, but it’s too painful to do so. Even if he would be better off for a thousand years to come, it isn’t worth the temporary pain for him to remove it. Many people say this creature represents sin. Possibly, but it can be an analogy of our avoidance of growth, the comfort that starts as a good thing, but eventually turns into a creature that’s causing us to miss out on what we could truly become.

What’s your creature?

Here are a few signs that suggest you may be faced with painful growth:

1. When more than one person points to an area of your life where you have true potential for growth, but you take offense to them even suggesting that you need work in that area.

2. The idea of growing in this area keeps you up at night for fear of the unknown.

3. You are in a painful part of your life and you want out. I don’t mean anything that is potentially harmful to you or your family (get out of that situation quickly or seek help!), but those times where success seems completely out of reach.

4. You feel utterly incapable of nailing your job requirements.

Painful growth happens when we can’t see out of the valleys of our lives.  Bob Goff puts it this way: “Embrace uncertainty. Some of the most beautiful chapters in our lives won’t have a title until much later.”

We should lean in to the process of painful growth. You were meant to be more than you can see.