It can be exciting, delightful, fun, and refreshing.
It can be difficult, painful, heart-breaking, and depressing.
But you can't resist it forever. Eventually, you accept it and move on, creating a new routine, a new perspective, a new normal. Rarely is it easy; often is it for our own good.
This week marks a lengthy list of changes in my life. Some joyous or unexpected; these I gratefully receive and enjoy working into my life. Others are tough and tiring; these I have withstood and have only grown to accept them out of necessity. But there is a reason for everything and when I pause my pity-party to consider the positive, I can truly be thankful for all the changes happening in my life: the easy and the hard, the pleasant and the taxing, the ones I like and the ones I dislike.
A year ago, I would have let such changes drive me to the state of an emotional roller-coaster. With my intense and unrestrained desire for control, the difficult changes occurring in my life would have whisked me to a mild state of despair, while the unexpected changes would have moved me to a desperation to rule my own future. I know this because I experienced it. My foolish heart believed that I did have control of my life and if something went wrong, I was then responsible for the outcome, thus dooming myself to be a failure. Past posts on the blog tell the tale of my crash, burn, and cries to my Savior to pick up the pieces of the mess I made. My failure brought me to beg forgiveness for forgetting that this life is not my own; with the price of His pure blood, Christ bought me to glorify the Father (I Corinthians 6:19-20). In seeking my own control, I sought to place the creature above the Creator (Romans 1:25); to put myself on the throne of my heart. But Jeremiah 17:9 tells me clearly, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"
I am thankful that my Savior lovingly led me through the hard lesson taught many times over; God is in control, I am not. All of my careful planning, my devised steps, if made without submission to what my Lord wills, is all for naught, because I can do nothing on my own: "And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?" (Luke 12:25). Proverbs 16:9 states: "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps." However, God doesn't leave me on my own. As the perfect Father, He lovingly provides all my needs, directs my way, and guides my heart if I but submit to His will for me (Luke 12:31). Knowing that my life is not my own, but enslaved to Christ, I should take joy in bearing the easy burden my King gives me (Matthew 11:30).
I may not be able to control the changes that occur in my life, but I can control my reaction to them. May I prayerfully come to the Father with thanksgiving for the changes He is working in my life. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28).
