The Patient Art of Becoming
While summer seems a season of vacationing, relaxed schedules, and outdoor activities, it also feels like the season of youth. Children’s chatter and laughter fill my neighborhood as their endless fun and curiosity spills over dancing on bare feet. Many of my walks have offered me the opportunity to catch excited conversations filled with dreams of “grown up days” as impatient hearts still play dress up on the lawn. How well I remember my own summers dreaming with my friends about how grown-up we would be in the new school year. Yet all these years later I am still learning the patient art of becoming.
I suppose every child longs for what seems like the privileged life of an adult, the one we perceived as children as that time when freedom reigned, no one bossed us around, and we could do the fun stuff.
Wanting to skip to the front of the grown-up line, I have vivid memories of my frustration in the dreadful wait to get there. The typical 5-year-old, going on 25 years old, I continually advocated for my progress into adulthood, claiming a rite of passage that was yet years future.
At the same time, I remember those tentative times where the expectation of my maturity and preparedness to move into a particular role kept me clinging to familiar strengths, fearful of emerging as the updated version of me.
The tension between both these scenarios reflects the age-old pursuit of the patient art of becoming.
But more than learning the patient art of becoming an adult, the frustrations and fears which fuel both the emotional development as well as the spiritual development of our souls and psyche trademark our transformations.
Many times in the fifty plus years of walking with the Lord have I voiced my frustration at slow developing spiritual maturity evident in my petulance, poor discernment, and downright foolhardy behavior. Made all the worse by my knowledge that I knew better.
While at the same time my hesitancy to step into a role of greater spiritual responsibility sought excuses couched in fabricated concerns and overthinking disguised as “prayerfulness”.
In much the same way we journey into adulthood and emotional maturity, our spiritual transformation occurs over time, at what often feels like a snail’s pace or the speed of light depending on which side of the continuum you presently reside.
Wrestling with what seemed God’s gentle nudge to move into a season of greater spiritual responsibility, my musings chagrined me with memories of youthful struggles and seasons of growth. Loathe to admit I still battled similar frustrations and fears, I lamented (OK I whined) before God hoping for His exemption from this latest assignment which was clearly beyond my ability.
His answers never fail to amaze me.
Sitting on my back deck I received one of those odd, seemingly unrelated questions to my request. God asked me what I heard while sitting there one early morning. Taking a moment, I realized the mild cacophony rising from the woods was the song of the cicadas.
And God replied, “Ask the cicadas, they will tell you what you need to know.”
Cicadas. They knew the answer to my fears about growing up spiritually?
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?”
With some trepidation, I took some time for researching cicadas and not long after I began seeing them everywhere. On my window and door screens, trees, and even on my front porch. It felt a little Hitchcockian as I wondered at the sudden onslaught of the creatures and what their next move might be.
After my initial shock, I became fascinated with them. They not only were quite beautiful, but they were amazing creatures. Often confused with locusts, many people fear them, but they are not destructive to trees, foliage or crops. Larger and more beautiful than locusts, they also sport stunning colors and markings.
In my area of Pennsylvania, we have what are known as the annual or “dog day” cicadas which emerge every year and the 17-year cicadas which only emerge every 17 years. I also learned this year was an unusual year having both “broods” as they are called, emerge simultaneously due to weather conditions.
While I gleaned many interesting facts about cicadas, the most interesting for me pertained to the growth pattern and molting. From the larvae stage until the adult stage, cicadas molt or shed their exoskeleton five times. They must emerge from underground to do this, or they will die.
They shed the exoskeleton in its entirety against a tree, and you will often find the empty shell still attached to the tree. Each time they emerge they display a more developed body, though the process evolves over time.
In sitting with the cicadas, I saw the similarities of my childhood impatience to reach adulthood and the fears of actually being grown up. Despising the counsel of my mom and other adults reminding me that growing up was a process of many years, I made many bad choices. While at other times my fear to shed the childish ways for more responsibility, led to missed opporunities.
I observed the same parallel in my spiritual journey, one of seesawing between taking responsibilities for which I was unprepared and avoiding opportunities God placed before me. Both trajectories require a lengthy process, patience, and courage.
The cicadas trusted the process and as a result, emerged exactly according to the careful design of the Creator.
They bravely face the arduous task of molting five times over a long period of time depending on the species, fulfilling their purpose as the Creator designed without impatience or haste.
“Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
While the work of conforming us to the image of Christ (Romans 8:28-29) falls to God’s hand alone, it is not the work of a day, a month or even a year. It is the work of our lifetime; yet along the way He calls us to shed our old selves and step into spiritual maturity.
Different from the call to leave our “pre-salvation” old life and sinful ways behind, this call to shed our old selves speaks to leaving behind the baby Christian way of life for that of a maturing Christian who rightly divides the Word of Truth and serves in a more responsible capacity. Like the cicadas, our “exoskeletons still bear our likeness, but we become more of our true selves which by degrees begins to reflect more of the image of Christ.
Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned from the cicadas was implicit trust in the Creator and His process. While frustration and fear may tempt me to doubt the process, the song of the cicadas will always remind me of the surety of His hand.
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