Change

Change.  It's something we look forward to at times and yet dread in other moments.  It's the thing that signifies progress, but it can also be what moves us away from something we need to remember.  

I've really felt the impact of change in the last week as I've watched my baby girl turn one and move from infant to toddler.  It's in me as after a 13 year absence from college I once more begin classes to pursue a bachelors degree. 

As I've observed so many things changing in lives around me I find myself contemplating that word a lot.

Change.

Why do we so often want it so badly we go to great lengths to achieve it?  As I look at myself I start to see that often I want change so I don't have to actually deal with something that God is trying to walk me through.  Often dealing with the thing that is in front of me is hard.  It means facing things that I've spent years trying to ignore and it means that I have to go into those places that hurt.  

Know how I know that?  Because I have this awesome husband that won't let me quit these classes I've started.  The last week and a half have been one panic attack after another for me.  

Quiz time?

 Que the panic attack.

  Paper due? 

 Panic attack.

Lengthy reading?

You get the picture.

The reality is I've wanted to quit since day 2, but we keep wrestling through the panic attacks to uncover the reasons that I have test anxiety.  And through that process God is showing me things about myself that I had used frequent change to ignore.  

One thing in my reading for class this week that really stood out to me because of what I'm experiencing in this moment of my life is the moment in Scripture where God changed Jacob's name.  We focus on the part of the story where Jacob wrestles with God all night and then the next morning God tells him his name will not be Jacob any longer it will be Israel.  This time reading through that story looking for things I hadn't noticed before and reading what comes before in the same sitting I was struck by the change that was going on in Jacob all along.  So often I think we tend to go "Oh, God changed Jacob's name and then Jacob was different", but that's not the case at all!  Jacob was letting God change him long before God ever changed his name.  The thing we can easily forget about the night Jacob wrestled with God is that it was the night before he was to meet with the brother who the last time they were together threatened his life.  I'm convinced that God didn't change Jacob's name to change him, but to remind him who he was.  Jacob was already coming back to face his past, but this new name was God's way of reminding him in a very real, very physical way that he wasn't the same man who ran away all of those years ago. 

I'm not an expert, but the thing I'm realizing about myself is that too much change can be me trying to take the easy way out.  I can use the surface change as a distraction to keep me from dealing with the hard things that are going to bring the lasting change.  And so (with the help of that awesome husband I mentioned) as much as it hurts I choose to move through the anxiety and the panic attacks for the slower, substantial change that will lead me to that new identity that God has waiting.

The Clutter of Empty Nests

Have you ever paid attention to the trees this time of year?  The leaves are just starting to come in and most of what we are greeted with even in a forest full of trees are empty branches.  Lately as I've taken walks I've been noticing that the trees aren't entirely empty.  Somehow God keeps bringing the empty nests to my attention.  The remnants of one little family of birds old life.  This is a place that played a role in their history, but this year they will move on and build a new nest in a different location.   It's just the way things are designed to work.

Sometimes I wish I could be a little more like the birds that once inhabited these nests.  To be able to accept moving on as part of my journey, but somehow that's hard for me.  There are parts of it I excel at, but the moments that feel like I failed.  I have a little harder time moving on from the perceived failures.  I want a redo.  I want to redeem the experience.  In those moments moving on is excruciating.  

Lately it seems that God has been addressing clutter in my life.  The hard part.... He seems to be pointing out that holding on to relationships after they've served His purpose creates clutter.  That's hard for me to wrap my head around.  Intellectually, I can acknowledge that as we move into different roles in life that relationships change, but somehow as an introvert I hate losing those places I've invested my energy and emotions.  

Today as I wandered through a local nature park I kept noticing those empty nests.  As I noticed the space they took up in the branches just waiting to unfurl their budding leaves I found myself wondering what are the empty nests in my life that God is wanting to move so that I can grow more freely unfettered by those things that pull my attention and energy away from what He wants to use me for.  What is it that is keeping me from abandoning the old life of last summer to fully live in this spring?  I'm sure it's an ongoing evaluation, but I'm finding it a necessary one.

White Noise

As I enter the last month of 2014 I find myself looking back over it with mixed feelings.  It's been such a roller coaster year.  I find myself marveling that the very things that filled me with hope and excitement at the start of 2013 have now become a source of immense pain, sorrow and isolation.  How does so much change from one year to the next?

2014 has become a year that while I would never change the birth of our beautiful little Myka, for the most part I struggle often with just wanting to forget the pain that is the last year.  I've had a lot of "why, God" questions this year.  Why when I've always experienced almost sickeningly good health do I have to be taken out at the knees by pregnancy?  Why does it have to impact all of my relationships in a way that leaves me feeling alone and isolated?  Why does that extreme isolation have to last another 2 months after our Princess Baby arrived?  Why do I have to continue to feel that extreme sense of aloneness even after that 2 months is up?  I'm full of why questions.

The reality is I'd love to snap my fingers and get over it.  To get on with my life the way I lived it before everything started to change, but the truth that I'm discovering is that while the answers to all of my "Why" questions aren't always apparent every so often God gives me a little glimpse at the reason.

You see, God has spent 2014 teaching me some important lessons, just like Moses had to flee to the desert to hear God, Elijah had to be separated from the noise of those around him and even Jesus, himself spent 40 days in the wilderness, I had to become separated from the busywork I was surrounded by that masked itself in relationships and church work to actually have the opportunity to hear what God was trying to tell me.

James reminds us that we are to "count it pure joy" whenever we meet with difficulties, but I think that myself like most people would like to kind of gloss over that part of Scripture.  It's much easier to read about the cancer survivor or the motivational speaker faced with the challenge of living life without arms and legs then it is to ask how that verse applies to me personally.  See, I know I'm probably not going to like the answer.

For me the answer has meant that God has had to remind me that I can't hear him when I won't slow down to listen.  When I'm caught up in the activity even of "good work", there is lots of white noise.  White noise while it's never very loud none the less drowns out beauty of silence.  This morning as I write this I'm sitting in a quiet living room before anyone else is up.  It's amazing what you hear when you stop to listen to what is going on around you.  I hear the little noises that my baby girl makes in her sleep.  I hear life starting to happen on the street outside my house as people start their morning routines or commute.  I hear the ticking of the clock that I often forget about.  I hear the creaking and settling of the house we call home.  And lets not forget the breathing of the dogs lying next to me.  In my daily life, I had become so busy running from one thing to the next that I never stopped to pay attention to the seemingly meaningless details.  The things that make up the fabric of our lives are the little things we often ignore.

I think that's what God has been using 2014 to show me.  The importance of taking those moments and just listening and being.  Whether it's with him or with the people I happen to be with, I realize that by having things taken away I value them more.  I realize that it's ok for me to give myself permission to spend an hour with someone and not look at my phone.  If I'm staring at a screen for a large portion of my time with someone, I'm creating white noise that keeps me from truly seeing what they need from me.  They don't need me distracted, they need me present.  The time that I spend with someone and how I spend it impacts how they will be a part of my life tomorrow, next week and even next month.  If I make them feel that I'm distracted and they are taking me away from more important things chances are that next time I try to spend time with them they might not be available.

I think as I try to re-acclimate to life after extreme isolation I realize the little things now.  I realize how I feel when someone I'm with is trying to carry on a conversation with another person via text while spending time with me.  I struggled for a while with how it made me feel, but now I'm seeing it as the gift it is.  Extreme isolation brings with it a higher sensitivity to how a disconnected person experiences the things that I might have never thought twice about doing before experiencing it myself.

At first I just thought of myself as broken.  Health that made it impossible for me to live a "normal" life.  Isolation when my health kept me from doing all the things I had once juggled successfully.  Now I'm starting to see it as a blessing.  God has given me the opportunity to clear my head of the white noise that we so often live our whole lives in and has allowed me to find value in whitespace and saying no to busyness while saying yes to life with purpose and being truly present in small doses rather than living in the lie that you can juggle dozens of "close" relationships successfully.  Never taking care of or truly taking time for myself to recharge and reconnect with God.  Don't get me wrong.  As my counselor reminds me, I'm coming out of this part of my life with a new identity.  One that I often don't understand completely yet and I do still have moments of mourning the "normal" life that I had at one time.  It seems like it would be much easier to go back to living in the white noise, but once you've seen the value of life stripped down there's no going back.

God's Timing

It's a funny thing how sometimes when you are going through some of the moments that change and define you the most you somehow don't realize how important they are until you look back in hindsight.  I think that's one of the interesting thing about God's timing.  It's subtle.  I think that's something that I've realized over the last five months especially as some of the lessons and experiences I've had over the last five years have come together and started to make sense.  It's had me re-evaluating my life, the people God has sent into it and the impact they have made especially over the last four years. 

In meeting up with friends I hadn't seen in a few months I realized something about God's timing.  Sometimes it's not just about when new events, people or circumstances are introduced into our lives.  Sometimes it's about the fact he asks you to surrender something you hold dear so that he can return it for an even greater impact in your life. 

I think one of the greatest challenges I've faced came earlier this year, in the belief that God was asking me to give up something I held very dear with no guarantees for the future.  It made no sense to me that at a time in my life when things seemed to be going good I was being asked to give up what I loved and was familiar with, something that I could look at and see had been a positive thing in my life.  At that time as the events of two years began to come together into the events of a mere four weeks, the recurrent answer that came from a friend to my repeated question of why ended up being "It's all in God's timing."

It's an answer that seems to have repeated itself often over the following months and tonight I realized that not just the new things that come into our lives, but the renewing of old relationships as we are ready to deal with them or react to them in a different way are in God's timing as well.  If we try to recapture initial moments of relationships as we know them, we lose the chance to see what can develop in God's timing.  While we see our slice of time and how it impacts us if we refuse to allow God to work in his time we miss the opportunity to experience what he has in store for that relationship.  Sometimes it means allowing time for it to grow and sometimes it means letting go.  Ultimately it comes down to realizing that God truly does have a perfect time for everything and if we let him work things out in his time it turns out infinitely better than our timing.