In my early 20's I was engaged with a group of hurting and fairly pessimistic Christians. At the time, I thought they were progressive and truthful, and didn't pick up on the underlying negativity. One of the girls noted that she was done “recommitting” her life to Christ. “I mean, how many times can you stand up and say 'I'm committing to follow Jesus?' I'm already committed, and it seems redundant.” It made sense to me at the time, and I decided that the whole recommitment thing was, well, silly.

I've been thinking a lot about arrested development over the last few days. While in certain areas of my life I'm growing, I feel like other areas have been in a holding pattern for years. I think a main reason why is because, in the back of my mind, recommitment was unnecessary.

“Look, I am making all things new,” God says. But they don't stay that way, do they? Newness is inherently temporary. This morning in community group we were talking about life cycles. It's everywhere—plants die in the winter and are reborn in the spring. Business leaders come into dying businesses and bring new lifeblood until they, too, need replacing. Friendships ebb and flow with life circumstances. Storms and floods wash away centuries of civilization that then need to start over. It's all around us, the cycle of renewal. And we don't just say “Well, I already planted that flower, and it grew, so it's silly for it to die and then regrow in spring.”

Spiritually, we go through times of distance from God. Even Mother Theresa had about 20 years where she said she didn't feel God. I can feel it when it's coming on, and I guess since my early 20's I've fought it. Maybe that's not the right word. I know it's coming, and I sigh, and I trudge through, and I don't celebrate reconnecting with God when it finally happens. I fight learning and settling into my new revelations—which are oftentimes just reminders of and expansions on basic principles I've known since I was young. My logic was something like: It's silly, to focus on a lesson you already knew and were reminded of, because that lesson was already learned. I couldn't see the new facets in what had already been a part of me. And that led to arrested development. Nothing was really worthwhile because it was all the same, and would always be the same, and when you've seen it all and done it all... as Solomon put it in Ecclesiastes:

Meaningless! Meaningless!
Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

And, I can relate to Solomon when he came to the conclusion: “So I hated life...”

Now, after only about a decade, I'm finally arriving at his conclusion in that book: that with God the meaningless has meaning. The cycles are there for a reason. We may not know why, but that's the design. And new life is to be celebrated, in whatever form it takes. This makes me ok with all of the re-learning I have to do. Rather than fighting it, or feeling silly for the close-then-distant dance of my spirituality, I can embrace it as part and parcel of being a living being on this earth.

The eucalyptus trees in Australia grow in harsh conditions. In the outback, there's little rain and barely any nutrients in the soil. The trees cluster together in groups, their bark shiny and soft, and grow where they shouldn't be able to survive. Their bark sheds regularly, peeling off and landing at their base. Over time, that bark decays and turns into nutrients that then feed the tree, helping it grow stronger. Layer after layer, the outer skin of the tree dies and is reborn, so that the tree can grow stronger and taller and flourish. Through its own death, the tree generates more life within itself.

While I remain the same person, things grow and die and are re-born in a different way inside of me. Benjamin Franklin said, “When you're finished changing, you're finished.” Life is change. And for some reason I've embraced this in most realms of my life except for my spirituality. This changes today. I'm embracing the cycle.

Images from: top , middle (Copyright Wilbert Saint), and bottom