Graduation. May God richly bless Phillip and Emily in their journeys through life. Each of them have now grown through stages of life to gain more and more independence and the ability to make their own decisions. Now they ready themselves to test their wings by embarking on the next phase of life where they will gain knowledge and skills that will allow them to build careers for themselves and to raise families of their own. 

During the past week, emotions ran high as we celebrated this milestone in the lives of the eldest two of our five grandchildren.. We were given many opportunities to relive the growth and development of Phillip and Emily. We saw pictures, home videos and DVD productions of their lives. We relived precious moments as they were nurtured from infancy to learn to crawl, to walk, to feed themselves, to ride bikes and to drive cars. We remembered them before they knew how to talk and read and to relate to other people. We remembered them as they grew up, but we also remembered them as infants who found security in the dependency on their parents. They lived solely by faith.

As little children we all lived by faith. Then as Jesus did, we grew in wisdom, and in stature and in favor with God and man before reaching the maturity to stand on our own, make our own choices and live with the rewards and consequences of those choices. We want to call it maturity—life lived much more on self reliance and much less on faith. But there are still more lessons to learn.

Somewhere in the path of life, we have faced or will face a test that is larger than we are. It may be financial difficulty, a serious health problem, a broken relationship, or a tragic loss. But whatever the situation, we discover that we really can’t feed ourselves, and we can’t stand on our own without falling. Strangely enough, it is when we reach that point in life that we grow the most.. We learn then just how small we are, but we also discover just how big God really is when we turn to him. 

We begin as little children living by faith. We have faith that Mom will feed us and that Dad will catch us when we fall. We grow beyond that phase of life, but in the course of time we find ourselves in the same place again. A little older, a little wiser maybe, but if we live by faith like a little child we find security in dependency on God.

Isn’t it strange that infancy and maturity are so much alike.

 

 “You are the light of the world.”