Change

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased,
cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.
– D. H. Lawrence


Why is change so difficult?

When it comes to change, I don’t mind the coins I carry in my pocket, but I’m not so sure I want to deal with change that is truly substantive.

How do we know what kind of change is needed; what kind is good or healthy; and what kind isn’t?

For instance, your child is happy, friendly, and dependable, and then one day you begin to notice he/she is acting differently. Your daughter comes home from playing with her friends and you notice how she is now wearing black nail polish, heavy mascara, and clothing borrowed from what you can only presume to be the local crypt-keeper. She’s listening to her I-pod and you hear some sort of tortuous sound emanating from her ear buds – something akin to the reverberation of a hundred car pile-up on HWY 99 in the fog, combined with the screech of 1000 steel fingernails on chalk-board.

She has changed. Is it for the good? Is it a passing fad or fancy? Is it something to be concerned about? Do you need to put your foot down and demand she change back into the child you want her to be? Is it significantly different from when you were her age and similarly rebelled in independent lockstep with your peers back in “your day”?

It isn’t the change that bothers you, of course, as much as what the change may represent. It could be a matter of your child simply trying to find herself and to carve out a niche she can call her own – one that resonates with her soul. Or it could mean she has fallen headlong into the bowels of Satan, and sold her soul for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. How can you know which it is? How can you know for sure? What do you do with your doubts and fears?

Any major change is scary. We want to protect our children, but we don’t want to smother them. We want them to make mistakes and to learn from them, but not to the point of hurting themselves or others too badly.

One way to deal creatively with these changes is to spend time examining your own life, looking at the decisions and choices you have made over the years, and recognizing how those actions have affected yourself, your family, your friends, your job, your present, and (in all likelihood) your future.

When a person makes a major change in life, it is important to recognize that much of what has gone on before has been erased to some degree, but never as completely as Lawrence may imply is necessary. Just like a computer program or file that has been deleted or uninstalled still resides there on the hard-drive – recoverable with the proper software – so do the values and experiences of life continue to reside in and with us.

The challenge we face in life is not to accept (or reject) the changes taking place all around us, but to take a long view of life and discern what changes we need to make to get us to where we are headed. As people of faith, that would be in the direction our God would have us go – taking us toward faith, hope, charity, justice, mercy, and other cardinal virtues.

Too often we wallow in the realm of what might have been, and by so doing we fail to appreciate what we have in the here and now. Too often we grab hold of what we have in the present, and fail to take the steps we need to take in order to reach a promised land flowing with milk and honey. But life is movement, and life is change, and to stand still is to die. And so while we may not appreciate all of the changes that come our way, we can know that those changes are a sign of life.

With a vivid imagination, we may even come to find that today’s screeching fingernails on chalkboards will become tomorrow’s golden oldies in this, our valley. Of course, I hope to be six feet under by then. But then again, maybe I could change my mind. Either way, let’s keep the change and invest it wisely.