Changes…SIGH!

I am standing in what feels like the eye of a change-hurricane.The place where I am not making major changes, but many close to me are.

People moving away, folks finding new jobs. They are changing around me and I stand in the eye not changing, but watching the havoc that these changes are wreaking.

I’ll be honest. I don’t like change, but I don’t like others changing with me left behind to clean up the damage the hurricane has caused more. Seriously, it is much easier to move away than to figure out how to live without those who are leaving.

Don’t get me wrong there is hope, there are great things that change-hurricanes bring. It is God directing these hurricanes after all. He is guiding and directing people away and He will guide and direct people here. I have hope that God is bringing change that would not happen in any other way.

But I don’t like change. I don’t like it when other people’s change force me to change. Keep your change to yourself so that I don’t have to figure out how to change because you have changed. (Dizzying isn’t it?)

Change shows me where my security is found. I discovered that I put my security (or comfort) in whether I can see a certain friend on a regular basis or in unchanging staff at my girls’ school. Ridiculous. I trust God. But do you? Do I?

Honestly no. Change shows me how much I count on things going my way or staying the same or friends being in my town. It shows the ugly parts of my heart – the selfish, proud, satisfied with mud-pie life when God has more.

Maybe these people are having to change so that God can change me. Maybe my hard, foolish, self-sufficient heart is part of the reason God is bringing these changes. If only I am willing to listen and change with my friends.

I’ll be honest it feels like alcohol on a wound. It burns. But maybe it needs to. Maybe I need my heart to be cleansed. Maybe this change, that is sad for me and great and sad for them, is the only way God could make these changes in my heart.

C.S. Lewis said, “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Today we would say microphone, but you get the point. God uses the hard, painful, difficult changes in life to wake us up. Shake us up and draw us closer to Him.

What is God teaching you through change? OR What has God taught you through change? I can’t wait to hear from you and connect with you!