Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

“Nothing changes if nothing changes.”

One of the pastors at church capped off a sermon with those words a few weeks ago. While spoken in the context of encouraging the congregation to act as better stewards of God when it comes to managing our money, the events of the past month have revealed how this statement’s sentiment reaches beyond my attitude toward money.

October and the beginning of November have brought significant changes to my life. My mom was diagnosed with Stage 1 cancer, and although given an optimistic initial diagnosis, we’re still waiting on the “final” word regarding her diagnosis and treatment options. Changing job duties at work have been coupled with a company vision change that has brought about operation, schedule, and personnel changes. The Husband finally got the Monday through Friday shift we’ve been hoping he’d get for over a year, but his hours are such that our time together will be significantly limited and we’ll have to rearrange different parts of our lives. Not a week has gone by this past month that has not brought some sort of change with it.

Change and I do not have a good history together—especially sudden change and multiple instances of sudden change that happen simultaneously. My Type-A personality doesn’t like the way that change marches in and disrupts my nice, tidy, ordered life. In fact, my Type-A personality reacts to change about as well as oil reacts to water, as ice reacts to heat, as Arizona drivers react to rain … you get the picture. In the past, I’ve responded to change by becoming self-destructive, folding in on myself, or digging my heels in and screaming enough to give Jonah good competition. It’s quite messy and horribly ugly, and I’m definitely not the picture of the “Everything happens for a reason” mantra I was raised on. (But I have yet to be swallowed by a giant fish...)

Part of why I don’t like change is that I can’t see the end result. I’m the person who reads the end of a book before starting it or fast forwards through a TV show before sitting down to actually watch it. Knowing how the book ends or the show’s series of events satisfies my curiosity about the story’s conflict and resolution and prepares me for what to think or feel during my journey from start to finish. Life, however, isn’t a book or a TV show, and I don’t have the luxury of seeing how a particular piece of change will pan out and planning for how I’ll deal with it and the bumps that may come with it. This creates an indescribable feeling of anxiety in me that often turns me into a raging basket case.

However—to combine my mom’s saying and my pastor’s statement—change happens for a reason. Without change, something that needs to happen wouldn’t happen, and I’d like to think that this would be far more detrimental than the uncertainty, anxiety, suffering, pain, sadness, etc., the change could bring with it. It’s hard to think this way in the midst of change, in the midst of thinking about how the final word on your mom’s cancer diagnosis could affect her life, in the midst of helping your coworker and friend pack up her desk after she is unexpectedly laid off, in the midst of trying to figure out how you and your husband will cram seven days’ worth of “couple time” and responsibilities into two days. In fact, it’s quite daunting.

But perhaps that’s where the change needs to start. Perhaps the change needs to start in how I respond to change. Rather than take the path I’ve taken in the past, perhaps it’s time to change my approach and take the road not taken by me before—the road in which I take a deep breath and compose myself when change is presented to me rather than ask unanswerable question after unanswerable question, get angry or emotional, or adopt a pessimistic outlook; the road in which I accept that (in most cases) I have no control over the change happening; the road in which I turn the change and what it brings about completely over to God rather than allow my brain to concoct different scenarios and how I would or should respond to them. This would be a complete paradigm shift for me, but nothing changes if nothing changes, right? I haven’t done very well in reacting to this month’s changes so far—although I think that I’ve done much better than I’ve done in the past—but it’s not too late to change my approach. It’s not too late to approach these changes with a changed heart and outlook. Perhaps that’s the change that needed to happen in the first place. Only time will tell…