Change
My contention is that no one really likes change. Even when change is good, I’d suggest that most people don’t like it. Some people are more flexible to accept it, but I still suggest that they don’t like it.
Whenever I go back to the city I was raised in, I’m amazed at the changes that have taken place. I remember when I went away to college, my mom tidied up my room and turned it into more of a reading room (in fact, my bed was moved into the hall to free up room for reclining chairs). I didn’t think this bothered me at first. For all practical purposes, the epicenter of my life moved from that house to over 30 miles away in my dorm room. But there was a loss of the last 18 years of continuity.
When we moved to New Orleans, change in my home town took on a different flavor. First, the house I grew up in wasn’t my home anymore (and hadn’t been for 7 years including college and my first job after graduating). I was just visiting. I started noticing things that I’d never seen before - was the living room really that small? Was the mud room always that dirty and smelly? There’s only one bathroom in the entire house and it’s on a different floor than the bedrooms? (I grew up in an over 100 year old farm house).
But it didn’t stop there. I started noticing new roads and buildings. I’d drive by the office building I had worked at a few months earlier and it seemed alien. Restaurants that we used to frequent were either better than we remembered or, more likely, less attractive than they had been. We spent less time visiting old friends and more time visiting family. Change, change, change, change.
Even within our little family, our son started crawling, then walking and talking. He gave up his pacifier and learned French (preschool benefit). We spent a good part of the 12-hour drive to where we grew up doing math problems in our head (not bragging, just a fact). I was studying for and passing exams to get my credentials.
By this point, I was managing people as part of my job. One of the burdens of middle management is that you must support your staff to the people you report to and support your management to the people who report to you. That means you have to be the cheer leader of change to your staff (even if you don’t want to). You learn to put on a happy face and spin the potential positives. There were lots (and I mean lots) of time I had to convey that I supported some change that was being implemented that I would have rather not pursued.
But such is life. They say that change is inevitable. As my experiences have shown, that seems to be an axiom (underlying fact) and not a theory (likely guess).
God isn’t that way. I was reading this morning that God is immutable or unchanging.
“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” - Malachi 3:6 ESV
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” - James 1:17-18
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” - Hebrews 13:8
When I think about change, I often worry about the kind of change that was shown in the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Hans Solo has been frozen and Darth Vader tells the troops to load the princess and the Wookiee on his ship. Lando complains that this was not their deal. Darth responds “pray I don’t alter it any further.” Imagine how bad it would be if our God wasn’t immutable.
