Change.
I
don't like it. I rebel against it. I exert myself in trying to hinder the
ultimate inevitable of life. There is nothing I can do, though, to stand against the oncoming rage that this river holds.
And
it's a river called change. And change makes me weep.
That
sounds dramatic, even for me. It sounds desperate. But it is, because I often
am desperate. Because I lose sight of what change truly is. Of what change
truly means. And all I can see is how change is affecting my plans and how
those plans are going to come crashing around my head like an erupting Mt. St.
Helen. But I so often fail to see change for what it truly is.
They
tell me change is normal. The media. The scientists. The brains of society.
They say that my body is in a constant state of change. (I wonder, then, why I
am not in a constant state of weep?) In order for our physical bodies to remain
healthy and functioning, they must constantly be turning themselves over and
creating newness.
Donald
Miller discusses this concept in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand
Years, as he quotes a friend:
“People
get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren't. The human body
essentially recreated itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and
skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who
you were in February.”
My
body is adept at change, and yet still my mind doesn't like it. Or perhaps that
isn't even possible, because my mind is just as adept. Every word I say, every
person I meet, every book I read, changes my mind. I am as a machine that only
gets smarter if you show me something new.
We
all are.
And
yet, even as my mind grows as I write this, I still claim to hate change. And I
am tempted to say that hate comes from my heart. But how can my heart hate that
which it knows strongest through Christ: change?
I
was changed by a God who I could not resist. I could not stand against His
change in my life. Then why do I buck so fiercely against all other changes?
What is within me that hates it, that despises it, that accepts it reluctantly
if I come to accept it at all?
Something
was very strongly impressed upon me this summer that I had thought little about
before I mean, I'd thought about it some, but not much. Not really. And that altering
truth was this:
God
is unchangeable.
And
not just that He doesn't want to. It's not just that people haven't tried.
God
cannot change. It is not in His nature. It is utterly impossible for God
to change in any way whatsoever.
I
watch a movie. I see a new actor I had previously not seen. I change because
something new has entered my mind that had not entered it before. I listen to a
new song. I meet a new person. I breath a new breath.
And yet
God knows all. There is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
He is the same yesterday, today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
I am the same NEVER. Nothing about me is ever the same as it was
before. And yet I serve a God who knows no change. A God who is unchangeable. And that bring immeasurable hope, because my hope is
founded in One who cannot possible change the reason that I hope in Him.
Heartbreak, rejection, betrayal, fear, divorce, murder, dishonesty, sin. They
are all a result of change.
Of people changing. Of decisions changing. Of plans changing. Of
hearts changing.
But God exists outside of change. Change is not a part of Him.
The author Sheldon Vanauken says this in his book, A Severe
Mercy, in regards to another aspect of the earthly condition:
C.S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how
it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there.
'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact
itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always
be, purely aquatic creatures?' Then, if we complain of time and take such joy
in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest?
It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be
purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not
only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations,
even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it – how fast it goes, how
slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't
adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as proof, or at
least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.
He is questioning why he
hates time. Why he does not feel at home in it. Why it bothers him so.
And he realizes it is because He serves and strives to be like a God who is
outside of time. He realizes he was created for a timeless place to be a
timeless person. And so he longs to be outside of time like his Father.
He
longs to be timeless as God is timeless.
And Vanauken's claims made me wonder if that is the very same
reason I cannot grow accustomed to change. The same reason I hate it. Because I
long to be like and be with an unchangeable God. Christ has changed me, yet
still my heart long to be where I will never have to change again. Where it
will not creep up on me like a foreboding shadow. Where what I love won't have
to be traded away for something else.
Where I will be perfect.
In an eternity that does exist,
and is most definitely our home.
