There comes a time in a baby’s life (usually around six months old) when milk is not enough to sustain growth and solid foods have to be gradually introduced. Food still has to be pureed, but this is the time when new tastes and textures can be introduced into a baby’s diet.
Not all babies respond well to this initially, often spitting out the new food at first because it’s unfamiliar. Gradually, however, all babies will move on from milk to solid food.
In the same way, Peter urges new Christians ‘like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation’ (1 Pet 2:2), but this milk is not enough to sustain us throughout life. The writer to the Hebrews says ‘anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.’ (Heb 5:13-14)
The process of weaning us spiritually from milk to solids is often not pleasant. When we’re first saved, it feels as though we live in a haze of wellbeing and a glow of grace. God seems to answer our every prayer and provide evidence upon evidence of His blessing and benevolence. But there comes a period, often known as the ‘dark night of the soul’, when we no longer feel God’s presence and can even doubt His love. Well-meaning people may tell us that if we’re no longer feeling close to God, it’s not God who has moved and we can become extremely worried, anxious and even despairing. Perhaps, though, all that is happening is that God is weaning us. He does not want neurotic dependency on Him; He is looking for child-like trust which will follow Him even when we cannot see where He is going. Is 45:15 talks of the God who hides Himself, and sometimes in those dark times, it’s not that we’ve moved away from God or that God has actually moved away, but that there is a weaning, a denial, a waiting period which we find tremendously difficult to understand but which is designed to help us to trust. God promises that He will never leave us or forsake us (Heb 13:5), but there will come a time in every Christian’s life when we have to believe that promise by faith, rather than because of our feelings or because of the visible things we can see. Just as the baby may have to wait longer than it wants for its meal and then be given food it would really rather not have to digest, so too God may make us wait longer than we want for His answers or bring circumstances into our lives that don’t seem at all good, but He is looking to shape us into the image of His Son and bring us to maturity.
Maturity means we turn to God, having nowhere else to go (see Jn 6:67-68); we nestle into His arms; we rest in contentment in Him even when we have no idea what to do about the storms that rage all around, even when we are as confused and as worn out as that screaming baby.