During the growing years, my son often woke at night with a bone-deep ache in his legs. He shifted beneath the sheets, trying to find a comfortable position, but his calves and knees and thighs throbbed with pain. He tried to wrestle and rub the pain away, but often resorted to pounding his restless legs in frustration with small, clenched fists.
He’s grown now, with legs long and lean. His growing pains are of a different sort these days–they are the pains of college applications and AP scores and truth-telling and courage. We no longer measure his height with penciled marks on the door frame of the butler’s pantry, we look instead for the intangible signs of growth. We measure the signs of a well-formed character.
After years of watching my son suffer at night, one of the great surprises of adulthood was discovering that growing pains still exist in my own life as I grow older. After childhood, after the pursuit of vocation, after the bearing of my own children, after the commitment to developing a cruciform character, I still lie awake wrestling and restless. Even now, decades into adulthood, I’m learning to make peace with the way the inner self stretches over time and the pain it still causes.
I have struck knee and thigh, cursed aching muscle and bone, but the growing pains appear every time I reach the edge of my known experience, which occurs more often than I ever imagined in childhood.
Even as I wish them away, I’ve learned that the purpose of growing pains isn’t to frustrate me, but to rouse me from my sleep. They awaken me to the unknown, the imagined, and the intended. To cross the great chasm into maturity requires pain and purpose, but what joy we find on the other side, where we discover ourselves awake and alive, standing tall at new heights.
