I'm on the bank of the Thames watching Tower Bridge watch the tourists. Change sits beside me in the absence of Helen, my partner in crime (i.e., cooking and cleaning). I'm on our Thursday night walk alone. In about half an hour I'll return to my apartment building where my friends are not.
I know change can be good, but this change messes with me in a way I've never felt. A year passed faster than it should be allowed to, and I'm left reeling from one teary goodbye after another. I still wake up to the neighboring construction site's drills, hammers, shouts, but there's no one left to hear my noisy rants about the noise.
How strange that your entire life can change overnight.
One day you're part of a close circle of friends doing a gap year together, and the next day they're homebound on their coaches and trains and planes, and you're an intruder in your own home. (That might be a bit dramatic, and the new teams here now are great, but that's how I felt.)
Why do I fight change so much? Why is it so easy to make routine and security and comfort and familiar faces my god? Something shifts, someone leaves, and my entire world disintegrates. I'm left wondering if maybe they made up too much of my world?
Characters in the Bible experienced change, which tells me we're to expect it in our own lives. Abraham was told to move countries. Job saw everything he loved snatched away. The disciples watched their hope die on a cross. Life IS change, especially in this fallen place.
I know it's ok to mourn this loss. But I'd be fooling myself to think life stays the same. I'd be fooling myself to want that.
New seasons bring new pain. But I can see that through every loss and heart-breaking transition, God brings good things, too. And it's encouraging to remember that the same God who brought those people through their most difficult times of change is the same God who brings me through it now. I may hate the noise from the construction site, but those workers aren't just over there getting paid to make noise. They're building something. (More flats, I think.)
It's the same with us. We're not built into Christ's likeness without change, without the noise. But these words bring me comfort in the throes of change, whether the change dashes me to the floor or simply makes me sit less comfortably: "In the hands of a changeless God, I need fear no change."
"[He who fears the LORD] is not afraid of bad news; his heart is firm, trusting in the LORD."
Psalm 112:7
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