“Did she agree with his actions? Campbell wasn’t sure. The old law made her feel safe. Protected…Yet her mother’s heart wanted her son happy…Given any other circumstances, she’d praise Nathaniel’s choice. So perhaps she should let go of fear and distrust.” Rachel Hauck, Once Upon a Prince p.320 Kindle edition
It’s that time of year. Graduations and weddings fill up our weekends. Year end banquets and assemblies fill our evenings. An election is right around the corner here in our province. The ending of one thing to start something new. You can’t have a beginning without an end. I think I read that somewhere. What it amounts to is change.
Do you have a love/hate relationship with change? I do. I like the thought of something new or different but at the same time, I get very comfortable in the old ruts, even if they aren’t always healthy or in any way good.
Change, however, can become our best friend, but we often treat it like our worst enemy.
Change can breed fear and distrust. We fear the outcome of said change. We fear God does not have our best at heart. We fear disappointment and loss. We distrust people. Sometimes it is wise to do so if they have been abusive but many people are good yet we keep them at arms length. We distrust the process of change. I mean if it’s not broken, why fix it?
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We may think the old ways protect us, like in the quote above, but do they really? Maybe they need an overhaul too. Just like us. Just like me.
Part of me fears change because it means I have to examine the blackness of my heart. Why resist so ardently? Why fight so ferociously? Honestly it’s easier to fight or hide than it is to face the hard truths about ourselves sometimes. But change is a way God brings these things to our attention, doesn’t He?
How? Sometimes when change occurs, there is a stopping. A rest. It may be long or short but there is a break in the chaos, the milieu around us. There is a silence. Do we use it to root out the blackness or do we hide? It’s up to us.
Is it going to be a pleasant experience? I think not. But it’s got to be better than the fear, the distrust, the anger that courses through our veins as we resist it, right?
It’s a time for healing not fighting. To let God come near and do what needs to be done as we rest, and have time to reflect.
It’s a time to accept hard truths. About ourselves. About others. About circumstances.
It’s also a time to look at the lies and take them apart. What have we believed that was not true? About God? About our circumstances? About people? About ourselves?
It’s a time to gain strength as we stop and rest. Because it’s not the end. It’s the beginning of something new. It’s a time to grow so we can enter into this new phase prepared for what God has planned not just for us, but for His glory. We forget, I forget, it’s not just about us. God cares about each detail of our lives but there’s a bigger picture we conveniently forget about. In the stopping, maybe we can get a new perspective too.
We have a choice as we enter a time of change or just the slower pace of summer. We can stay in the fear and distrust. We can remain stunted. Or we can embrace the change, the stopping, and let go of it. So we can continue to grow into the person God prepared us to be. To be ready for the beginning of something new.