Change

We've been speaking a lot about change (not surprisingly) and while my heart is longing to put my own words to just how I feel, I'm not quite there yet. However, I've been re-reading a book by Don Miller called "Through Painted Deserts" and he grapples with the idea of change throughout the book and I love what he has to say. The first four pages of the book are absolutely stunningly beautiful and express a bit of what I think we are feeling right now...

"...everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The 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 so they can love it again 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 the same page recurrently...No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his 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'...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?..." - Don Miller from Through Painted Deserts

In our hearts, even as we've watched the hillsides of Colorado explode into a flame of golden yellow Aspen leaves, and as we've sensed the coolness of Autumn coming on restlessly, we've understood that we too are changing. We are not who we were when we left Seattle 5 weeks ago. The God of limitless imagination is at work and we are simply trying to hold on as he rolls us around in His hands, shaping and reshaping who we are so that we might wake up full of hope each morning that who we once were is no more...