Religion: A Pastor Ponders

Growing or Maintaining?

by Pastor William Jenkins

December 30, 2005

At the recent football awards banquet on the campus of Notre Dame University, Former football coach Lou Holtz told the attendees that the key to success is to keep growing. Holtz, who led the Irish to their last national championship in 1988, said one of his biggest regrets is that when he restored Notre Dame to an elite program he focused on maintaining the program instead of seeking to make it even better. “The thing I truly regret is, we maintained”, Holtz said. “You’re either growing or you’re dying. The minute you start maintaining, you start dying.”

Any organization that focuses on maintaining their present position is doomed to regress. I learned a good many years ago that the only sign of life is growth. If something is not growing, it is dying. People also must avoid the maintenance trap in favor of the growth mode. We are created to grow to the best of our abilities.

Maintenance is a necessary part of life, but it is not the purpose of life. Many people live their lives in a maintenance mode, they have settled into a lifestyle that is routine, predictable and makes no demands on them. If that is where they want to be and they find satisfaction in it, more power to them.

Yet even in the maintenance mode, there is room for dreams. If the predictable and undemanding life is not where they want to be, maintaining will not work. A person will be dissatisfied, disgruntled, and empty if there is something within them that calls for release in the way of dreams and high hopes.

New Year resolutions attempt to break the mold of maintenance. Starting a new project or finishing an old one, dreaming a new possibility, throwing off emotional and mental lethargy, are all movements from maintenance to growth. In the New Year resolve to move beyond maintenance to growth.

Just pondering.

League City United Methodist Church is located at 1411 Main Street (FM 518), one block east of Interstate 45. For information, call the church offices at 281-332-1557 or visit the website at

HYPERLINK - http://www.lcumc.org