It is often difficult to see growth. We can monitor change sometimes but actual growth is often elusive in any visible way. Growth is something we most recognize in retrospect. After the fact we can see how we, or someone we are close to, has matured, evolved, grown into a wiser or more fulfilled being. But the actual growth is often invisible while it is happening. It is as if the hard work, the stretching and pulling, the pushing and bending,happens in some hidden way that can only be seen and noticed after it has happened. Perhaps this is just how growing works.

Over the last week I have been driving on country roads back and forth to our church’s retreat center. Koinonia, as it is named, sits on Lake Sylvia about an hour’s drive west of the Twin Cities. The drive there takes me through field after field of, you guessed it, corn. And what I have been so aware of is how the corn is growing. First it was only about two inches of green, waving arms visible only if you really were looking with all your might. But within just a few days these green, outstretched appendages are visible as the tall beings they will become. Field after field now looks like corn!

This windshield time and the sheer expanse of these fields has me thinking of all the ways we can despair at the lack of growth. In ourselves. In others. In our institutions. In our nations. The patience for growth is so often in short supply. We want to see whatever growth we hope for immediately. Right now. If it is learning something new, we want it to happen in the next moment. If it is change in a system that is cumbersome or no longer useful, we want the growing to follow our own time table, some schedule we have configured most often for our own comfort. But growth rarely happens this way.

This past Sunday the worshiping community I am privileged to be a part of celebrated 20 years of worshiping together. It is a community that sings, prays, laughs, cries and hopes to express the way they see God show up in their lives. It was the Sunday called Pentecost where we hear the scripture of how the Holy Spirit came upon the early church and the people were able to hear one another speak in different languages but yet all were understood. The story is one of seemingly immediate growth. And perhaps it happened that way or perhaps it can happen that way. The immediate cause and effect of Spirit and understanding, Spirit and growth, Spirit and blooming.

But as I listened to the stories people told of how they came searching or broken and found wisdom or healing, this did not happen in the flash of brilliant moment. It took the metered exercise of showing up, of giving in to being cared for, nurtured, of engaging in building relationships that mattered, of seeing the Face of God in the person next to them. This growth first required vulnerability, one of the first steps in growth. The seed first has to go into the soil and open itself to sun, rain, wind and all the elements for growth to happen.

Growth takes time. It is not always visible or certainly not fast enough for our impatient temperaments. Growth has its own way of moving in and offering its wisdom. On Sunday we had the joy, the sheer joy, of seeing two of the young ones who had blessed the circle of worshipers in our beginning life as a community. We had not seen them in some time. What did we notice? How they had grown! What had once been two, sweet little girls who liked to sing and dance and twirl during worship were now tall, beautiful young women, poised and ready to tell us about their amazing, unfolding lives. This growth did not happen over night. It has taken the patience of years in order to become.And that is as it should be.

In a few weeks I will head back out along the fields lined with corn. If the weather is kind and the sun and rain do their work, these fields will be ripe with the gifts of tasseled stalks. Corn. All from tiny seeds nurtured with time and patience and a good bit of luck and faith. It won’t happen over night but if it works as we have come to expect, it will be ‘knee high by the Fourth of July’.

And to that is just as it should be.