this week has reminded me that change is inevitable (and i am not talking about obama). i visited minnesota last weekend and watched two friends get married – their lives are now forever changed. while at the wedding reception, i looked around at all my surrounding friends dancing their socks off and thought, “these people have changed and have changed me, and it’s hard to even recognize because i am woven in them and they are woven in me.”

friends make us who we are and change us for the better. friendship is a complex design of threads and patterns, and you can’t tell where they begin and end, but you don’t need to because by the grace of God, they will go on and on. this is happy change.

there is also change that is not so easy, and has been difficult for me to swallow. i hate the change of people moving away or friends being separated by time and distance, of sweet and precious children getting older and bigger when i knew them inside-out at a younger age, and of one season melting into the next. autumn is here, and my favorite season of barbecues and sunburns and ice cold beer and lake chelan is fading away, just as the sun is fading away behind the changing leaves earlier and earlier each evening.

i had a strange thought on monday when i returned home and began to unpack. in my exhaustion and dip back into reality, i thought, “what is the point of savoring each moment of life when these flashing moments collide into a giant heap and become nothing but a collection of memories?” 

i thought how many memories are so painful to look back on, either because they were painful then, or because they were so sweet and savory we might just think no future moment can be sweeter. i thought how memories are not tangible, and we can’t always remember past events unfolding in our heads exactly the way they truly were. i thought about how memories of my own childhood and teenhood are already so vague and dreamlike, as though i am only visualizing a story that was told to me and not lived by me. i thought about how the hands of time whip around the clock without regard to my desires. i can’t slow down evenings or mornings, or weekends or vacations. i can’t slow down my life, and i can’t stop this constant change, around me and inside me.

i need prayer from you. help me to see that this change is meaningful, necessary and good. help me find ways to record the way i change for the better, so i can look back and see my growth as a woman, wife, daughter, sibling, child. help me get through this seemingly depressing time, when the warmth of the day is eventually replaced by artificial heaters and heavy coats, and the sky is increasingly gray and wet. instead, let me see the possibility of new and exciting times, like a fireworks show about to start. let me find happiness and joy in catching blazing red leaves and learning to make homemade soup and snuggling up closer at night with a hot cup of tea.  

most of all, help me to deeply know that throughout any change i may undergo, painful or not, Jesus Christ is the one constant, unchanging force. He is the hook on which i can hang my life.