The Mystery of Subterranean Growth

Many years ago while on an extended retreat, the Catholic Sister who was helping me attend to prayer suggested I consider a Jesus-story in my prayer. The retreat came at a time when I was especially earnest about prayer and my own spiritual progress. I was working it hard, pushing to move toward the spiritual goals I had set for myself. This is the parable she handed me:

“This is what the kingdom of God is like. A farmer scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether the farmer sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though the farmer does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain – first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, the farmer puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4:26 – 29)

For 24 hours I read it, pondered it, asked God what it meant for me, and listened to what God might say to me in it . . . basically for 24 hours I lived with these four verses. Honestly, even after years of preaching and teaching, I don’t remember encountering that text before. But almost immediately, I began to hear God’s voice in it. I heard clearly that spiritual growth and “progress” were not primarily my work, as if I could control it, manipulate it and manage it to fruition. In the short parable, I heard the voice of the Holy Spirit saying that spiritual growth is God’s business, that it happens at God’s initiative and that it is brought to fruition in God’s time and in God’s ways. It was a hard lesson for me to hear, yet something within me intuited its truth.

These many years later, I’m grateful for that parable and for the Sister who invited me into it. Almost daily I see the reality of that Jesus-story lived out in the lives of people who are striving and struggling to make spiritual progress, yet who discover in mysterious ways that God is at work far beneath the surface of their lives in hidden ways they have not considered.

That quiet, beneath-the-surface growth is hard to see. It is not showy and flashy. The prize doesn’t go to the one who manages to look or sound most holy. Spiritual development isn’t sexy and in-your-face eye-grabbing. It happens slowly and gently in the subterranean regions of the soul, down where seeds germinate in the fertile bed of God’s heart.

Here’s the deal: Spiritual growth is happening this way in you! You can’t manage it and you can’t control it. God is doing a work of shaping and reordering within you that you have no idea about. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be intentional about your prayer or that you should neglect spiritual practice; but it does mean that ultimately you can’t force the growth to happen any more than the farmer can hurry along the seed toward harvest. This is interior work, and God is in charge of it.

Then there is a corollary, radical in its simplicity and potential to change relationships: Spiritual growth is also happening in everyone else you see day to day! No one is left out! That includes the person in whom you see absolutely no sign of Spirit, the dishonest co-worker, the arrogant classmate, and the stressed-out family member. This Spirit-work is subterranean in them, also; thus, just as you cannot mark your own interior progress with God, so you will not be able to gauge where others are. You don’t need to.

So be generous with yourself. Extend yourself some grace . . . and do the same with others. There is more going on beneath the surface than you know!