This weekend marked a series of changes in my life.
I have a love-hate relationship with change.
Sometimes I love it because it can be exciting.
Change can mark exciting new adventures.
Or it can be the result of really painful endings.
This week saw me walk up a set of steps in a building that has held both great joy and nearly unbearable pain.
It was a building where I met my husband, but also the building where poorly chosen words have resulted in incredible pain that I find myself still battling.
I find myself a little surprised at the bittersweet feelings that came from the last walk up those steps.
You see, the pain is familiar.
I've just adjusted to it and life without it scares me a little.
The emotions that I experienced exiting that building for the last time surprised me.
I thought I would experience relief, but instead there was sadness and fear.
Sadness that things had not ended differently.
Sadness at ending a chapter of my life.
Even if I have cause to walk through the door of this building again, it will not be the same.
That is where the fear comes in to play.
Change can be scary.
I had learned to cope with the pain, but coping is not the same as healing.
To heal there are moments when we have to let go of what is familiar,
We must let go so that the old life we were comfortable with does not infect the new life that God is calling us to embrace.
At the same time that I was closing this old chapter, a new chapter was opening;
The chapter that screams community.
As one door closed another opened,
This door made me realize that sometimes the old things we hold on to out of comfort actually prevent us from seeing the new life that God is inviting us into.
In having daily contact with this chapter that needed to close I was distracted.
Within an hour of closing that door, I began to change.
I started to see the community around me differently.
I began to engage differently.
I was no longer torn between the old and the new.
See I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wastelands
Isaiah 43:19
The reality is that God was doing a new thing in my life, but I was not fully absorbing it.
In the time I had been mourning lost friendships and the change that had felt forced on me, God was providing sources of life and connection all around me.
While Isaiah 43:19 encourages us to look for the new thing that God is doing, just as important for me was verse 18:
Forget the former things;
Do not dwell on the past.
The fear that change brings for me can make me idealize the past.
I can find myself focusing on what I have "lost" to the point I completely miss the exciting new things that God is creating around me.
Some of my exciting new is the discovery that one of my oldest daughter's best friends in daycare was actually the son of someone my husband knew from his childhood.
Another little boy at our new daycare who is close in age to our youngest is the son of one of my brother-in-law's good friends.
All of the sudden connections and community begin to develop within hours of closing a chapter.
Change can be terrifying, but if we choose to hold sacred the former things we knew
and to dwell on the past we will completely miss the streams that God is providing in what can seem to our limited perspective to be a wasteland.
But have you ever thought about what happens when you begin to introduce the life-giving source of water to a wasteland?
The opportunity is given for life to begin.
What can look to our past-clouded vision to be a wasteland is to God an empty canvas of endless possibilities, but it requires stepping away from the familiar and embracing the change of the wilderness and the wasteland.
What change is God trying to introduce in your life?
Does is scare you to death?
You're not alone if it does!
