When I was in middle school, I remember thinking I didn’t feel like I thought “like a teenager,” but instead that I thought like a child some percent of the time, and an adult some percent of the time, and what people were reading as adolescence was just the average of the two. I reasoned that as you got older, you had more time thinking like an adult and less like a child and it was that gradual shift in the balance between the two that people saw as “growing up.” In retrospect, this does not check out at all, teenagers have a very unique neurological structure triggered at the on-set of puberty, where increased neuroplasticity makes their brains in some ways more similar to toddlers than to either children or adults.1
But, I can follow 13-year-old Kat’s reasoning, and if you remember your early adolescence, I am sure you can, too. The capacity for abstract thought sets in around that age, and all of a sudden your brain can wrestle with concepts of philosophy, religion, morality, justice, and, in my case, theories of adolescence.2 At the same time, you still want to play with legos. You probably still watch cartoons. It’s not a smooth transition from childhood to adulthood, and it very often feels non-linear, halting, and misbalanced. Your body outgrows your brain and you can do algebra but can’t remember where you put your homework.
Sometimes childhood recedes before adulthood is ready to take its place, and sometimes childhood lingers in areas where you wish it would just move aside to make room for your grown up self. Adolescence is hard, it’s confusing, it’s unpredictable, and it’s slower than we want it to be.
But maybe all real growth and transformation is. Anyone who has ever trained for a race, or some kind of athletic event, has seen this, where instead of being a two seconds faster every day, you have a few good days in a row, then a couple of bad days, and then a few more good ones, back and forth, and its not until months down the road that you realize how much the training has actually paid off. Seemingly by design, our bodies are stubbornly resistant to predictable, linear progression.
This is the story of scripture as well. The Israelites learn and re-learn the same lessons over and over as their moments of faith are often followed up by disaster, and a re-treding of the same ground over and over again. The disciples famously miss the mark over and over again even as they walk in the literal footsteps of Jesus. While we may tease them for it in a sermon, we all still call Peter “The Rock.”
Can the same trajectory of growth be true for us? Can we see halting, uneven growth as just what growth normally looks like? It’s the new year, and it is a time that many of us find ourselves reaching for a version of ourselves that is more organized, more fit, more committed to our spiritual disciplines. We set budgets and goals for our organizations for growth in depth and in numbers, for better alignment with our values, for all the things we think we should be doing better.
But are we ok with what growth really looks like? With the uneven steps, the halting, two steps forward, one step back reality of the slow and uncomfortable emergence of the habits, health, growth, and transformation we want? We at Incubators work with a lot of early-stage innovators and walk them through the process of getting their ideas off the ground, and let me tell you, never once have I worked on an idea that didn’t have at least one moment where it seemed like we were going backwards.
So let’s embrace it. Our God is one who seems to prefer the messy, the organic, the human process of growth, and not the tidy, linear process that humans imagine for growth. Whatever your goals are for 2025, I hope you can walk towards them with the grace you would show to the awkward middle schooler, or sword-wielding disciple, stumbling into a whole new way of being.
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