Change

Some seasons subtly blend into each other, but autumn shouts look at me with its bursts of color. Here in northern Indiana we have distinctive seasonal changes. We experience changes as we travel through the seasons of our lives as well.

Recently, I finished reading  Turn Toward the Wind: Embracing Change In Your Life. I don’t know about you, but I find it disconcerting when my favorite lotion is “improved” by the manufacturer and doesn’t seem to work as well as before or the brand of socks I love is discontinued. Embracing is not a word I would use to describe my natural response to change.

We establish routines, set up schedules, and make plans deluding ourselves that we can somehow avoid disruptive changes. But disease, an accident, the death of a spouse, a Great Financial Recession inform us that we have very little control over changes in our lives. Losses especially remind us that we are not as in charge of our lives as we might think.

What we can control with the help of the Holy Spirit are our responses to change. Somebody once said, “God is not nearly as concerned with what we go through as He is with our response to what we go through.”

Do you ever feel like God is using a megaphone to amplify the message He has for you? For me, He brings the little book Turn Toward the Wind into my life; next, someone donates a book by Carol Kent to the GV library and as I peruse it, there are 2 chapters on change and lots about response; then Sunday, my pastor starts a new sermon series on prayer by looking at Hannah, and he states that difficulties allow God’s power to shine thru our weakness and let us place our trust in God’s goodness and sovereignty. Changes are opportunities for growth. Hmmm.

One thing that does not change is God’s steadfast love for us. James 1:17 says “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father … who does not change like shifting shadow.” The never-changingness of a faithful God gives us confidence to trust and to find our security in Him.

Of course, that phrase from James is echoed in the well-known hymn, Great Is Thy Faithfulness.

Great is they faithfulness, O God my father, there is no shadow of turning with thee. Thou changest not, they compassions they fail not; as thou hast been thou forever wilt be.

Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.