A Paradoxical Pursuit

These past several months, nearly all of my thoughts and learning have centered around my acclimation to all of the change in my life. I've graduated, gotten married, moved, left college, and started a career. And while absolutely none of the change in my life has been bad, change is just difficult. It is the pain of leaving familiar things and the effort (and sometime pain) of acclimating to new things.

But the question occurred to me the other day, why is change so hard? Why do we dislike it so much? One would think that in the world we live in, where everything is always changing and nothing stays the way it is, that we have at some point become accustomed to the constant flux of life. But this is not, and has never been, the case. The paradox is that we expect something from the world that was never promised us. We strive toward some constant stability that this world has really never offered. And yet we pursue it still. True some have largely given up on the quest for stability, saying they rather enjoy bouncing around life in all its newness but, probably more accurately, this is largely a resolution to the state of things around them than something they really had a choice over.

And so I contemplate in my own heart why change is so unnerving and uncomfortable. I think about where this desire comes from and where my heart could possibly hope to find what it desires. And so I've come to realize that we are, in fact, made for such constancy and stability but, as with many other things, we have been looking in the wrong places.

This is a perfect example of a larger issue I'll only briefly touch on here and perhaps write more about later. Built within each of us is most certainly a desire for the Person that created us. Think of a child's desire for their parents but much deeper than that. And so people will go about life convinced that they have no desire for God but still desire the things of God which, ironically, is the sum total of who he is (let he who has ears hear). Constancy and stability are some of those things of God that we almost universally desire. We have in Jesus a God that describes himself as a Rock, who calms storms and says that he is the beginning and the end all at the same time. He rises above all of the change and flux in our world to become the One that we can always count on above all others.

I still find it comical that, just to maintain our phony sense of independence, we would settle for cheep imitations rather than go to God and take what he offers. Thirsty and wandering in the desert, I, for one, will take the water setting in front of me and drink deeply. I know many that, for some reason, would rather eat sand - I know because I was once there. If I was made to desire the things of God I will no longer look for cheap imitations elsewhere. In the midst of all the change that I am now both enjoying and struggling to acclimate myself to, I find so much joy in the fact that the peace and constancy that I look for and need can always be found in the same Place.