With the benefit of hindsight, it’s not difficult to admit that change is good. We do not become who we need to be without altered circumstances, in spite of the pain in the process. It’s hard to believe until we are well past the gate, but change always has the potential to be good. It gives us the opportunity to be better, to grow, to lean forward and dig deeper. Once we’re there, we can nod our heads at our own history, we can acknowledge the results.
But it’s hard to believe, in the midst of the turmoil. My friend Lisa posted this quote by the Philip Yancey (author of one of the most transformative books I’ve read, The Jesus I Never Knew):
“I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.”
If you live in the paradigm of grace, change triggers growth, resulting in faith.
But it’s hard to see.
There are so many around me who are enduring painful change in this season; difficult medical diagnoses, basic surgical procedures gone wrong, loss of jobs, imploding marriages, changing relationships that change the future. In the chaos of their circumstances, there is pain. It is difficult.
One person I know said, with no small amount of anger, “I don’t want any canned Christian phrases. I can’t even cope…” God bless you. I don’t want any canned Christian phrases either.
I sat down to write this morning about the current season of change in my life; how my three daughters are all living somewhere other than this house this summer, and how my anxiety almost crippled me as I contemplated life without the swirling mass of female energy that has always defined our home life. Like a rushing wind, some weather event of joyful energy, my emotional energy has been fixated on my daughters. There have words – many, many words! – and questions and laughter and tears and let’s not forget the massive amount of clothes everywhere. There’s stuff of the practical, daily living, and matters of the heart, the way that big, broad personalities fill up all the empty space in the house. The way the dynamic of sisterhood brings intense conflict and incredible love. It is big, and it is busy, and loud and emotional. And it’s all I’ve known, for almost two decades.
And now? Change. Quiet. Space. Vision. There’s the general contemplation of what comes next for the girls, as each one prepares for college and work and new relationships and independent living – anxiety on a different level. But also, there are eyes to see (mine) the young men who have lived in the midst of the swirl, space to hear them and settle into silence and uncomplicated maleness. I have a sixteen-year old son. I have a thirteen-year old son. The shade of their sisters gone, they are in my field of vision now, and I am discovering the joy of a more complete and focused love for them, without distraction and unhindered by their role as, simply, The Boys.
I sat down to write about that sort of change this morning, to acknowledge that I have survived, it’s not so bad, and that it has been surprisingly good. I have settled into something that makes sense, and I have discovered that I really, really like being the only female in a house of men; not only the ones who live here, but also the ones that tag along with them, crashing on the floor to eat ramen and drink Gatorade and sleep, arms and legs flailing, on the couch in the midst of it all.
I sat down to write about this good place I am easing into, and of the irony of a 12:17AM phone call last night, from a daughter who had a week’s worth of words that needed room to roam.
Things have changed, and some of what is different still bruised and tender. I miss my girls. I pray for their safety and stave off worry and anxiety over their well-being. My maternal cloak of protection stayed home with me, and I leave them to their good sense and the watch care of God.
Change is painful, regardless of the circumstances and details. I have known the backbreaking pain of the big ticket items; illness and loss and death and divorce and sin and shame. The relatively minor (and somewhat natural) process of releasing my children to independent lives pales in comparison, but change is painful, no matter the details.
Yet the result is always the same, when you look back; the aching may remain, as Andrew Peterson says – but the breaking does not. The cracks are filled in.
Faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message:
The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see.
Struggling with current circumstances? I have no pithy phrases to alter your perspective.
But because you cannot see, the paradox of growth is put into motion.
And that’s a good thing.
