Photo by Pixaby.com

I’ve written before about my attitudes in the past about change.  I didn’t like it.  There was nothing about change I liked.  It was disruptive, it usually wasn’t friendly, and I spent a lot of my time avoiding it.  Funny thing was that no matter what I thought about change, it still happened.

I wonder what would happen if us humans were to embrace change completely.  I believe the Lord wants us to change our minds about change because, well, things are changing all the time.

Take my parents for instance.  They were born in the 1920’s.  My goodness, think about all the change that has taken place in our world since then.   Airplanes and flying were still in their infancy.  Television hadn’t come onto the scene yet.  Movies were still black and white.  Computers hadn’t been thought of (well, perhaps someone was thinking about it, but they didn’t make it onto the scene until much later).  Folks were still dying of measles and smallpox, routinely.  Food was all prepared in the home because there were no prepared foods.  I could go on and on.

When we come face-to-face with change we often balk.  I can’t quite figure out why this seems to be the go to attitude for so many of us but I see it over and over. We just don’t seem to be very friendly with change and yet change is all around us, day after day, as a regular part of our lives.

Today I had occasion to talk to a banker about the ways we can get our money to another person.  I wanted to know if there was any way I might not be aware of that we could receive cash without actually going anywhere, as in without leaving our home (it’s a long story!).

We are indeed quickly becoming a cashless society.  We can have our checks direct-deposited into our checking or savings accounts.  We can, if computer/Internet savy, pay our bills via billpay.  We can wire money to others.  We are now able to text money to others – I didn’t know about that one.  We can also email money, another version I’ve done only once.  It seems we can get money to people fairly easily but you must still be able to get to a bank or at the very least to a cashier at a store to be able to receive cash for yourself.

The point is, the world is an ever-changing place.  We see it all around us, we live with it everywhere, and yet we fight it’s existence and get downright testy sometimes if we perceive we are expected to change in some way!

In my last post I wrote about my choices.  If change is inevitable, and everything about life seems to indicate that is true, then I have a choice to make.  I can either go with the things that are changing around me and learn from them or, I can hang onto my old ways.  In my past, I hung onto my old ways.  Sometimes I hung onto them until it hurt.  Sad but true.  I spent a lot of time hurting back then.

Once again I come to the fact that when I’m facing a change, I get stuck in my ways because somehow I don’t believe God can help me.  “This thing is way too big for you God!  I certainly don’t know know what to do with it, so how could You?”  When I state it in this way it sounds just ludicrous!  As I wrestle and fight over this thing that I don’t know the answer to, I find I’m actually holding the problem hard to my chest and I seldom allow anyone into the problem.  Even as I write this, I’m realizing just how stupid this attitude is!  And yet I’m guilty of this thinking.

These days I’m attempting to have a looser grip on change.  I don’t want to hold onto my ways so tightly that I’m stupid about the changes coming.  God is so much bigger than me and He knows the end from the beginning.  If that is true, and I believe it is, then He knows the best route out of this dilemma.

Just like that, what pops into my mind but the children of Israel wandering around in the desert.  They didn’t like the changes going on in their world either.  They started grumbling to Moses almost from the outset.  Here was God providing for them in new ways (manna, water from rocks, the promise of a new land) and they were holding hard to their chests the old ways.  “We want to go back to Egypt.  We may have been slaves but at least we had garlic and onions to eat!”  They were an ungrateful bunch.  Funny, it’s so easy to see it in them, so hard to see it in myself.

Now let’s look at the truth of the matter.  God had a place for them.  It was a fertile land and they would be free from captivity.  They would be able to thrive in this place.  All they had to do was trust God.  The problem was they couldn’t see His provision any more than we can when faced with change in our lives.  But God hasn’t, nor will He ever, change!  What we so easily see as His provision for our ancestors, He certainly has the same in store for us.  The provision is there, waiting for us, we just have to go with the change and trust Him!

God wants to show us marvelous things!  Did you hear me?  He has absolutely wonderful things in store for us – because He loves us!  But the catch is we have to go through the changes in order to realize them.  Just as the children of Israel had to get to the promised land before they could realize the wonderful place it was, so do we have to get through the change before we’ll see His provision in our lives.

If we’re ever going to become a butterfly, we must stop crawling around, go into the pupa stage and allow the wondrous change to occur!  It will be a marvelous change.  It will be a brand new day.  Help me Lord, I wanna fly!