“While growing spiritually, don’t be looking for the next ‘buzz.’”

These words from last Sunday’s sermon deeply resonated with me. I spent so many years seeking that one “Mountaintop Experience”, that one spiritual  “silver bullet” which would put right all of what so often felt so very wrong inside me during about the first decade of my walk as a Christ-follower. My assumption was that God could not possibly want me in so much pain. If I were really His, I obviously just had to access some kind of all-powerful transformative moment to have all my doubts and fears in my Christian walk put right, right?

Wrong.

Now, I should make it clear that during those years I did have some incredible “spiritual buzz” moments, times when God’s presence was so powerful upon me that I truly was transformed for the duration of the experience. Unfortunately that duration also happened to almost always be pretty short and when it was over it was not impossible to find myself actually feeling even worse the next day than I had before my time on the mountaintop! In fact it sometimes resulted in what one might call a “valley experience.” This certainly was not always the case, and I do not want to give the impression that there was, or is, anything intrinsically wrong with experiencing the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit. I treasure the memory of every time such an experience happened. Believe me, more than once they pulled me up out of near-despair. They were largely manifestations, I believe, of the grace of God coming through at some of the times I needed Him most.

That said; none of them turned out to be that silver bullet for which I longed. The climb out of the difficult years of my early faith-walk was just that, a walk. The better spiritual health I finally came to know took grace-empowered work, took human as well as directly divine help and, perhaps most of all, took time. God’s grace allowed me to persevere in the Faith on a daily basis for years of what seemed like glacial, often painful growth (or even no growth), until I slowly began to feel myself coming to a different and better place. Even today I still “have my moments”, times of great spiritual, psychological, and emotional stress. The difference is that I no longer expect God to make it all permanently better in one momentous moment where He “fixes” me forever. That, I now know, will have to wait until I’m with the Lord.

So if I can leave you with a summation of this whole piece I think it would be this: Enjoy those spiritual “buzzes.” They are, as someone once wrote, “postcards from Heaven” but do not seek them, especially as a quick and permanent fix for your trials and tribulations. If that is what you expect such experiences to do for you, you will be let down every time. God simply does not work that way with his growing children, and since He is God it is safe to say that He knows what He’s doing. After all, the Bible tells us that a comparatively worthless blade of grass grows dramatically (and dies) in a very short amount of time. By contrast, how long does it take for a Giant Redwood to grow to magnificent maturity?