Sometimes things change.
Sometimes, all the time people change, life changes. It’s nothing but profound, this changing, it’s
an inevitable part of life and it’s clarity in happening doesn’t make it any
less easy or exciting or sad or glorious when it occurs. It’s the wheel of unrelenting dice that get
thrown or spun and you never know which number will spin right side up even
when things, the change itself is the wrong side down. Changing of size, place, spirit, mindset,
level of love, rank, color, emotion, human forms find themselves slowed and
then stopped, willingness becomes refusal.
I blinked and my kids are half of them grown beyond what I
ever thought they would. I mean, how,
how does it happen? They were just the
size of my forearm and would nuzzle there for hours and months and years at a
time. I just thought they’d stay little
forever because in the moment, when they were little that’s what it felt like,
that it would take a million moments for them to grow up. At the time life was a mysterious mix of
glorious light and dark drudgery, monotony, long nights, tedious days and
euphoric bursts of joy, too. But they
did, they grew up amazingly and half of them are teenagers. Overnight they became teenagers and how? Did the "make them long and lanky" fairy visit
them in the night or did they eat the wrong half of the cookie that makes them
grow big? The how never and completely
gets logically answered for me.
My father's life was cut short by cancer and I visited a whittled body and wonder how can he die this way and why? It was a horrible death and it shook my world. Change had come and it blew strong and hard in the moment and for many reasons. The cascade of pain and sorrow came with it and knocked the wind right out of me, a strong fist, unexpected fist in my back and more than one blow.
We live
expecting and knowing change comes, but then when that expectancy of anything becomes fulfilled we are in a state of wonder and awe and sometimes despair, for not all
that we expected comes. Not all that we
hoped comes to fruition and sometimes what we knew would come to pass does just
a little too frighteningly soon.
This morning we read an excerpt of the life of Amy Carmichael
about how she longed to have blue eyes as a child because hers were brown. A sweet prayer from a small child just simply believing. Her mother had taught her that God always
answers prayer and with child-like faith she would pray fervently each day to
God to please make her eyes blue. He
never gave her those blue eyes that she wanted and she wondered to herself if
God could give the answer and that maybe it would be no sometimes. She figured that would be the case and that
God would know what is best. And many
know the story of how those brown eyes kept her safe while she was a missionary
in India. There was a reason God had
made her eyes brown and not blue. Things
happen for reasons and maybe none of them seem good at the time it is, change is happening and maybe that is naïve thinking
to many as well, that God plans things for certain reasons or maybe He does not
intervene for a certain reason, but I think things are set in a certain order
for unforeseen and just as many unending reasons. How can we know the mind of God? I don’t know and I’m certainly not sure of
all of His plans for my life, for my family, what changes may come quickly to
heap themselves upon us without warning or seemingly no good cause or
unexpected blessings that come, too, that surprise and delight us. Who knows? And we can rack ourselves weary with trying to find out.
What I do believe and feel I know deep within my own soul and
for myself is that there is a benevolent Father God in existence who looks on
the whole of His creation with a complete and pulsating love that never withdraws from its
throb of duty to press on in perfection, never wavering, always thriving and
ever aching for you, you, you who enjoys and suffers change. You, the one that longs for someone or
something and feels the sting of a hope deferred. You, the one who has seen your loved one
slowly perish from this earth. You that
lost something or someone you could always count on, a friend, faithful and
true now suddenly gone. Uncertainty that
ragged edge knife thrown at us many times could drop us to our knees in
bleeding fear and stabbing pain. And for
that and through that and in that and above that, around and marinating with
this process of change, He, the comforter is there, has and is and always will
be there for you, dear one, part of the whole world He loves. You.
Yes, you. Take note, take a deep breath and believe with the faith of a little child. He is the God of all comfort.
“ Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who
comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who
are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted
of God.” II Corinthians 1:3-4
