“Whatsoever things are . . . lovely . . . think on these things” Philippians 4:8
Change
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
Dallas, TX
I have a couple of friends who wake up every morning trying to think of things to change that day. No matter how well things have worked in the past, no matter how smoothly things are running now, and no matter how the status quo is humming along, their nostrils flare with the prospect of changing everything.Today if possible. If not today, then tomorrow for sure. Certainly no later than Friday of this week. Just run over anybody who gets in the way, or fire them, whichever comes first. But do get on with the change.
Me?
I just hate change.
One of the best things about God, it seems to me, is caught in a wonderful old hymn, “Abide With Me,” one stanza of which closes, “O Thou who changest not, Abide with me.”
And one of the many good things about the Lord Jesus Christ is that he is “the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8).
A little change is permissible, I suppose, if it comes slowly. For instance, the transition from one season of the year to the next is quite nice. The growth of a child from stage to stage and from year to year is about right. I also liked the really imperceptible growth of a great old spruce tree that grew by the side of our cabin in the mountains. This tree was at least 100 years old and 200 feet high when I built the cabin by the river in 1958. Then the dreaded bud worms moved up the valley and killed that grand old tree. When we cut it down, I counted the tiny growth rings, one for each year of its life, on the stump and found that it had averaged growing less than an eighth of an inch in diameter for each of its 124 years of age. Watching it grow for the forty years I knew it was sort of like watching paint dry. Not all that dramatic. But quite satisfactory.
As I mentioned, I really do not like change, especially fast change or sudden change.
Whether we embrace change or resist it, however, change happens.
Adam is purported to have said to his wife as they left the Garden of Eden, “Well, Eve, we live in an age of transition.”
In spite of my own aversion to change, I have hammered out a reasonably satisfactory way to deal with it.
When change comes, I try to fall back on Romans 8:28. “All things are everlastingly working together for good for them that love the Lord and are called according to his purpose.” At the time of unwelcome change, I have often felt in my bones that Brother Paul may have just blown it when he wrote that. But time and perspective have a way of validating it, time and time again.
Sometimes it is not possible to perceive any good in the change wrought by cruel fate. At such times, I have been known to fall back in mute despair in the realization that we live in a fallen world. Things simply do not always work out right. Troubles come as surely as the sparks fly upward. As a wise and wonderful grandmother I know said recently to a coddled grandchild who was whimpering because he had skinned his knee a little, “Get over it.” There may be nothing else to do but to get over it.
Not many things in life are more solidly satisfying than old shoes. Old hats pleasure me. Old and threadbare clothes move me to signs of contented satisfaction. No less an eminence than Thomas Carlyle has observed that you should never trust the heart of a man for whom old clothes are not venerable. Old clothes, old hats, and old shoes, however, do wear out. I mean plumb out. Like my good neighbor’s dearly loved old dog with massive arthritis and metastasized cancer so that she is simply could not get on her feet any more and was mercifully put to sleep by a sympathetic veterinarian, old clothes, too, pass their point of no return. Change is required. The new things are not really as satisfactory as the old. Given time, however, they too can become venerable.
Change can be the occasion for gratitude. Old age inevitably brings the loss of loved ones and old friends as it has been doing with unwelcome frequency to me in recent years. I have therefore often been moved to express deep gratitude to God for the many good times and the innumerable blessings extended to me by those who cared for me. As my vision dims, I am all the more grateful to God for all the beauty I have been privileged to see in days gone by. As hearing loss creeps up on me with little cat feet, I am moved to thanksgiving to God for marvelous whispers heard in the past, and for fine music’s nuanced intricacies which I cannot now catch. As worldwide travel and glorious adventures are now not welcome or even tolerated, I am now doubly appreciative to the Giver of all good and perfect gifts for those incredibly good times in the past when I have been there and done that.
Change is a reminder that though the mills of God grind slowly, they grind exceedingly small. God’s people, his kind of folks, may be perfectly confident in the knowledge that all creation, though now groaning and in travail, is tending toward a fruition, a fulfillment, a consummation that is far better than anything we now know or think.
Furthermore, and to dredge up a modicum of honest candidness in what has been something of a diatribe against change, I vigorously affirm change as being sometimes greatly needed. I think of human slavery, the systemic abuse of women, child labor, political corruption, economic oppression of the poor, rape of the environment, genocide, religious persecution, the trashing of the public schools, rampant gambling, the coddling of alcohol and tobacco profiteers, and family disintegration. Indeed, I have spent the last fifty years of my life focused on this motto, “Helping changed people to change the world.” That engraved motto rests prominently on my desk today.
Yet, I do hate change.
Except when it is the most important thing on earth to d
