I did not plan to write one of my Teal Deers today, but sometimes God has other plans for me… so I’m warning you right now, Emily Teal Deer alert incoming, hit the back button while you still can and abandon all hope ye who enter here 
Today while I was praying and seeking God I was thinking about how much I have grown as a person even in just the last few years. Like, I used to be scared to drive on the highway. And now I travel down to PA at least a couple of times a year for burns all by myself. And I try to push myself to take the highway at least part-way when I go, even if maybe I don’t go on it for the entire trip.
There were a lot of things I was scared of, actually. Some of them don’t scare me at all anymore. Some of them I’m still scared of, but I try to do them anyway. And some of them are still too scary for me to contemplate doing, but I know eventually I will conquer those fears too.
I’m nothing if not persistent, and when I want something I don’t give up until I get it. And maybe that makes a difference when it comes to growth?
So many people seem to just settle in wherever they are and don’t make many changes at all once they reach a certain point. But I’m more like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, always checking the electric fences for weaknesses. And once I identify those weaknesses, I want to change them for the better.
Because life isn’t about comfort and staying where you are. It’s about pushing yourself, and getting yourself to the place where you want to be. Learning and growing doesn’t stop once you graduate from school, and I don’t understand why so many people seem to think that it does.
You’ve probably heard people say that growth isn’t always linear. But I would also say that growth isn’t always perceptible, at least not at first. Sometimes you have to look away for a little while before you start to see it.
You know how you don’t see some of the kids in your extended family except on holidays? So you keep this image in your head of who they were when you last saw them. And then when you finally do see them again, months have gone by, and it’s like you’re seeing a whole new kid because they lost their front teeth, or they grew six inches, or whatever.
And maybe their parents don’t notice it, because they see them every day, but you do. And you exclaim, “Oh wow, you have really grown!” like the skibidi-Ohio grown-up that you are.
And sometimes I wish that we could have that experience for ourselves. I wish there was a way that we could put ourselves away for six months somehow. We would still live our lives, and still learn and change and grow, but we wouldn’t be aware of any of it. It would be almost like we were sleepwalking through the whole thing, like Adam Sandler’s character in the movie Click, except without all of the awful ramifications behind it.
And then we’d wake up one day and look at ourselves doing all of the things that we used to be so afraid of and say, “Oh wow, you have really grown!”
Because we’d be able to see it, much more clearly than we do during the day-to-day slog of personal growth and setbacks, washing in and out like the tides.
We would know that we can change, we can grow. And that it’s not too late to face your fears and start living the life that you want.
All you need is a willingness to do whatever it takes to get you to where you need be.