I certainly agree that God places obsticles in our path - but I believe He does so for a different reason. When Jesus said that we had to come to him as infants, I believe that means that we had to come to Him as desperate and incapable of doing anything on our own as that infant is. Why? Because He wants us to be 100% dependant on Him - not 50/50 or even 1/99. God's greatest desire is not our development, but our dependancy on Him. Obsticles are there not to make us anything - but to make Him everything. To strip us of our self reliance - build our self reliance. What was wrong with the Parisee in Luke 18:9-14? He believed that he had become what God had created him to be. The Tax collector was justified before God because he knew he had become nothing.