Good morning…
Our family is short. You saw photos of my parents in a few recent posts, my parents who stand 5-feet-1 and 5-feet-3. My older sister and I stand up really tall to reach 5-feet ourselves, and our younger brother is the giant of our family at a whopping 5-feet-9. My husband is also 5-feet-9, and our kids are almost 5-feet, 5-feet-3, 5-feet-7, and 5-feet-8. So my vantage point is slightly different on these words I read aloud in class.
“When my son was fourteen he experienced an episode of leg pains that kept him awake at night,” writes Sue Monk Kidd on page 24 in When The Heart Waits. “The doctor pronounced them as ‘growing pains.’ I didn’t know that such things actually existed. But I sat at Bob’s bed in the darkest part of the night and rubbed his shins while he moaned and ached. One night he looked at me and said, ‘It hurts to grow.’ I smiled, unaware that he was offering me a profound life truth. ‘But you always said you wanted to be six feet tall,’ I reminded him. ‘Yeah,’ he muttered, ‘but I’d like to do it without all this.'”
Monk Kidd concludes, “He wanted what we all want: a shortcut, some way to bypass the misery and still be six feet tall. To grow up spiritually means having growing pains in the darkest of nights.”
After reading these words, I turned to Rose Mutombo and asked, “Rose, our kids were probably born a few inches different in size, but now your kids are nearly two feet taller than ours as young adults, did they ever go through ‘growing pains’ in the middle of the night?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “They were terrible, really terrible. The kids would ache and hurt, and I would sit on their bed and rub their legs in the dark.”
You may know Rose, you may know her three kids, or you may know her husband, a famous basketball Center who played in the NBA from 1991 to 2009. Dikembe Mutombo is 7-feet-2 and weighs 260 lbs. When we are in the same room, I come up to his belt loop.
In this picture, Dikembe is speaking to a group of Senegalese people about the importance of sleeping under mosquito nets, the most effective means of preventing the spread of malaria. This is just one small example of how he, Rose, and their family provide a mammoth impact through humanitarian work in their home country of Democratic Republic of the Congo and across the globe. Though they have waited through many dark nights of giant-sized “growing pains,” God is expanding the soul of this influential family much larger than their physical stature.
Remember the wise words of one fourteen year old boy waiting through his own painful night: “It hurts to grow.” As growing people going through “growing pains,” physically and emotionally, relationally and spiritually, we must patiently endure the natural expansion process. Regardless of our age, stage, or height, to grow into all God has designed for us to be and to compassionately do, we must wait through the ache of many dark nights.
“Pay close attention now: I’m creating new heavens and a new earth. All the earlier troubles, chaos, and pain are things of the past, to be forgotten. Look ahead with joy. Anticipate what I’m creating.” (Isaiah 65:17-18, MSG).
…Sue…
P.S. Thanks to Gina MacFarland for the gorgeous photo of these tall, soulful trees.
