Nurturing the Life Within #3

When you compare nurturing an unborn child through pregnancy and nurturing your spiritual life, you immediately think of the changes you make to diet during pregnancy. You start eating and drinking the right things—things that will make the baby grow—and you stop eating and drinking things that will harm the baby. Similarly, when you want to nurture your new spiritual life, you begin to consume the things that will make your faith grow and stop consuming those things that drag your mind away from God.

Unfortunately, the change in diet during pregnancy doesn’t always happen, does it? We all know stories of children born with developmental disorders because they were malnourished during pregnancy, or worse, affected by cigarettes, drugs or alcohol consumed by the mother. Sometimes this happens because the mother is uneducated. More often it happens because the mother is lazy or unable to set aside her own desires for immediate gratification during pregnancy. She just keeps eating, drinking or taking whatever she wants to. Even mothers who start out with good intentions slip back into old habits occasionally as the pregnancy wears on.

Are there any parallels to nurturing the spiritual life here? You bet. When we don’t grow as Christians—when we fail to nourish the new life within adequately—it is almost always because we are lazy, bored or unable to deny ourselves some short term gratification. We skip reading the Bible because we watched too much TV in the evening and now we are falling asleep. We forget to pray because we are running around planning some festivity or family event, finishing a great book, exercising, browsing the Internet, flipping through catalogs, or whatever it is that we like to do. And because of that, we wreak havoc on the life that should be growing inside us.

When I have trouble turning off the TV and spending a couple minutes with God tonight, I’m going to think of those pathetic two-pound crack-addicted babies born gasping for breath. Surely I can find the will and determination to nurture the life of Christ within me a little better than that.