Earlier this summer, Jana and I made the pilgrimage that has come to define the childhood of most Americans: we took our three children to Disneyworld. We bought the shirts, the churros, the mouse ears – the whole deal. We spent 4 days in the Floridian heat, battling the crowds and the rain, with our 9, 6, and 3 year old kids. We had a great time… mostly.

See, if you’re a parent with young children, you know that particular stage of life that’s between the stroller and the walk. That’s where we are with the 3-year-old. We had the difficult decision to make of whether we took a stroller into the park, knowing that we were going to be walking hundreds of miles between Belle’s castle and The Swiss Family Robinson Tree House. In the end, we opted to take the stroller, but most of the time it became a carrier not for kids but for stuff because the 3-year-old is very independent. He’s a big boy, and big boys want to walk.

Unfortunately, big boys of his size want to walk SLOWLY. And as anyone knows, that doesn’t work at Disneyworld. You’ve got to get the fast passes. You’ve got to get in the lines. You have to open up or close down the restaurant. You’ve got to be on the move so that you can adequately exhausted at the end of each day.

Here, then, is the dilemma for the parent in that in-between stage: You either slow down so that the 3-year-old can keep pace, or you have to drag him along by the hand. It won’t always be that way or course. We found that the 9 and 6 year old were fully ready to keep up; in fact, they were the ones dragging us from attraction to attraction. I suppose that you might say that one of the marks of maturity is the willingness and ability to keep pace.

The scene, then, pictured is not unlike the dynamic of our walk with God. You have a father with a destination in mind walking along and a young son who in his mind wants to keep up but has his attention constantly drifting from this to that. The father, then, is dragging him along. But the mature son, the one who has grown up a little bit, is keeping pace with his dad:

“If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit” says Paul in Galatians 5:25. In this walk with God, we aren’t going to be left as surely as we wouldn’t leave the 3-year-old looking at Buzz Lightyear. He will, of course, alter His pace for ours. But there comes a moment when, not only are we made alive by the Spirit, that we are actually keeping in step. Keeping pace.

We have been made alive by the Spirit of God. Because of His grace, the Spirit has come and made our dead hearts come alive to God. We have been forever changed on the inside, and the Spirit of God has taken up residence inside of us. We are alive, never to die again, and we are walking. The question, then, is the pace at which we are walking. Are we meandering? Are we sauntering? Are we strolling? Are we being drug along like 3-year-olds at the theme park or are we growing into a maturity marked with our willingness to keep pace?

This is the image I have in my mind of what it means to be full of the Holy Spirit. It’s not sensational; it’s not mystical. It is instead of keeping pace. It’s no longer being drug along, but instead walking with purpose and direction at the rate set by the One walking beside me. When that happens, I’m pretty sure you can get to a lot more rides.