Change & Trust

By Gini Andrews:
"Life for most of us is not a steady-paced stroll through time with a beginning, a middle, and an end, like a well-constructed play. It's filled with change. We change schools, careers, homes, relationships, and "images" almost as casually as our great-grandparents changed horses.

Not that all change is by choice. Tragedy strikes and our lives change forever. Cherished friendships change in character or another person's choice cuts directly across our own, bringing us where we never wanted to be.

A career change, voluntary or involuntary, may disrupt our lives, leaving us searching for the chain that holds the beads of our lives together. Financial losses sweep away our props. Even geographic change can be disorienting.

And always there is the unchangeable, the irreversible. We long to go back and begin again, to undo our mistakes. Impossible, of course. When we pull out the nails of our failures, the ugly holes remain.

For the believer, then, the question is vital: Is our God the Lord of change? Will he be with us in change, especially when it strains our trust to its limit? Ironically, while we trust him with our eternal fate, we may find it difficult to trust him for next month's car payment, a new relationship, or an unexpected turn in our lives. The assumption that the Almighty is unacquainted with the complex people he has made keeps us hanging onto bits and pieces of our lives, deceived by Satan's ancient lie that God does not want the best for us.

In a threatened world, in the kaleidoscopic whirl of our life patterns, it can be enormously reassuring to remind ourselves that God is unchanging: "I the Lord do not change". (Malachi 3:6)"