the courage to change

Play - Pause - Stop - Record - Rewind - Fast Forward.

6 different options on the remote control. As I hold the remote in the palm of my hand, I can't help but wish that I could have one of these for my life. I feel like my life is stuck in fast forward and all I want to do is press a Pause button and freeze frame it.

Life is always changing. Call me a prude, call me boring, call me unadventurous, but I HATE change. Yes, I know I am using the word 'hate' and that it has strong connotations, I use it deliberately. I hate the fact that I have two places where I live, I hate the fact that I have to leave people that I love twice a year to be with the others that I love. I hate the fact that because I leave people, I have to constantly miss people. I hate the fact that I don't know where I am going to be in 5 years. I hate the fact that relationships always change. I hate that change usually means good-bye.

Alright, I think I have made that point clear.

Last week I was having this discussion with Tamille in her room, while laying on her Buzz Light Year comforter. She didn't say too much to try and convince me that change is not as bad as I think it is. Instead she just pulled out this chapter from Don Miller. (I am selecting the bits and pieces that struck me the most, but I encourage you to read it all. It's from his book 'Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road')

It is fall here now, my favorite of the four seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. These seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire, everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back again so they can love it again for the first time, and for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read one page again and again.

The only good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and I into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems; the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did you really do all of this to dazzle us? Do you really keep shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore your glory

Here is something I found to be true: You don't start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were too far out, that they were cast beyond my lifespan. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created so he could resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page, it has to be lived, a person has to get out of their head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

"I'll tell you how the sun rose. A ribbon at a time..."

It's a living book, this life, it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are, it is coming to a close quick, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still silence. And they will make a fire and pour wine and think about how you once were, and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be. So soon you will be in that point of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly towards its closure, knowing that the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualifications.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love other more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God.

We get one story, you and I and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it? It might be time for you to go.

It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry, everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

About the part of only choosing selections... I found that I couldn't leave anything out. It's a pretty challenging message eh? Not very comforting though. My attempt to describe it would be as frightenly beautiful.

I know that change is inevitable and I don't think I would even want to get rid of it, for it is the very fabric of life. What I am beginning to realise is that is takes a lot of courage to change, it is daunting to release what is familiar and secure and embrace the new. But you know what? I don't think I am willing to give up a life of meaning for a life of security, to give up the movement of life, and the power that comes with it.

So maybe I don't particularly hate change... but is it okay that I am still scared of it?

I just pray that someday I will be courageous enough to completely trust my Father, so that in turn I will be given courage to change.

*Listen to 'Every Little Thing' by Delirious