Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jeff Parrott.

Growing up.

This is how people commonly describe the process of aging and maturation over the course of life.

When it comes to the stages of growth and human

development, we really are growing up in terms of our physical stature. There are little children,

and then there are the grownups. At an intuitive level, we sense that our goal is to grow

in an upward direction. But this sensible nomenclature

can cause us to assume that all growth follows an upward trajectory. When we assume this, we live

like our purpose is to always become bigger, faster, stronger, more optimized. Life is always up

and to the right in an arc of accomplishment. Even when we're done growing in inches, we're still

trying to reach a higher altitude by growing up in every other sphere of existence. But what if real

growth isn't always meant to take us higher and make us bigger? What if growth is sometimes

trying to take us in the opposite direction.

In the book Living Life Backward, David Gibson writes this.

Part of growing up in the world is learning to grow small.

God intends us to be like children who trust their parents to know best because they can see what the children can't see and they know what the children are not yet able to know. For Gibson, a key

part of growing up isn't connected to us becoming bigger, faster, or stronger. It's about us becoming smaller.

But notice how for him, this process of growing smaller is inherently connected to our capacity

to trust God as a good father. He's not talking about growing smaller physically, of course. He's talking about

growing smaller spiritually, becoming like children who can depend on God more and more and more.

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