On Saturday I was attending a conference and heard Frog Orr-Ewing speak. Something he shared caught my attention. The tree rings that indicate the age of a tree are of two types. The wider, lighter color rings indicate growth during the Spring and Summer and the narrower, darker rings indicate growth during the late Summer and Fall (Frog called this Winter growth, which works well for identifying growth when everything looks dead, but it actually occurs in late Summer and Fall) . He then said that the sturdiness or strength of the tree is found in the darker rings that are much denser than the wider rings. He was sharing this to talk about how the state of the church during the pandemic, when circumstances were not conducive to gathering, could be seen as a darker ring growth for the church.

I am thinking about how this might apply to our own spiritual growth and the role of spiritual experience. Part of the context for my thinking is recently rereading Brother Lawrence’s Practicing the Presence of God. This is a valuable book, but I realized that I was put off by how Brother Lawrence seems to present a constant experience of the presence of God as something that was available to all with the right attitude and practices. Is that really an achievable goal? I know I am a long way from experiencing life in that way. Did Brother Lawrence have this because he was in a monastery, or an unusual personality? I also wonder if he really had this or whether his writing reflects an idealized presentation of this life of experiencing God’s presence. Mother Theresa’s private writings, that were published after her death, reveal a significant struggle with the felt absence of God in her life. A struggle that was surprising to many because the depth of that struggle was not apparent in her popular writings.

I am probably not doing justice to Brother Lawrence or Mother Theresa, but they represent to me different models of spiritual experience as it relates to spiritual growth. When I talk about spiritual experience, I am talking about things like answered prayer, sensory experiences of God’s presence, or personal, direct communications from the Holy Spirit. These produce a lot of spiritual growth in terms of being aware of God and having a desire to live for Him. When these are happening in our lives, it is like a tree’s growth when the natural environment is abundantly providing the sunlight, warmth and rain conducive to growth.

With a desire for that growth, many Christians think that this is the way that life should always be, the way that God wants it to be. More spiritual experience leads to more spiritual growth. But we cannot make spiritual experience happen, so this fuels a desire and pursuit of revival, when the Holy Spirit is pouring out an abundance of spiritual experience They have read about revivals in history and believe that this is what the church needs. They believe that God wants this for the church, it is a matter of us desiring it enough to have it happen, which is generally understood to be a work of intense corporate prayer for revival.

There is a history of revivals, but they are rare and they never last more than a few years. If this is really how God wants it to be, and this is how the church really grows, is God really so limited to accomplish HIs purposes? Or, do revival seeking Christians not have the right understanding of the spiritual growth that God is about?

What if there are two aspects to healthy spiritual growth, like there are two rings of growth in a tree? There is growth that comes out of abundant spiritual experience, but there is also growth that comes out of a withdrawing of that experience. And what if the healthy spiritual life consists of both? More on this next week. I think I am touching on something that I wrote about in a previous blogpost Restoring Devotion, so you might want to check that out.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.