Pilgrimage Ponderings
Change
I met a chaplain yesterday who made a comment that I'm pondering. She said that she thinks that God likes change.
Hmm. I hadn't really thought before about what God thinks about change. I know people don't much like it unless it's their idea. We are resistant to someone "upsetting our apple cart" that we have worked carefully to arrange just so.
I've always heard that God never changes. I do believe that God is eternal and that God's love for creation is eternal. But is eternal the same thing as unchanging? Does lasting forever and beyond time mean the same thing as always staying the same? Is it a contradiction to say that God's nature is unchanging, yet God's love for us is a fluid reality, adapting to us and expressing itself to us in the way we most need to experience it in any given moment?
I've heard for years the Benjamin Franklin saying "Nothing is certain but death and taxes." And in recent years I've heard the modern version that "Nothing is certain but death and change." All of that may be true. The certainty I like to rest in is one I learned from the early church. It is the conviction that when we search for God, God comes to us at our point of greatest need.
And for me, that point changes from day to day. I give thanks that God searches me out in the midst of my changing reality.
jc: Kathy, Great thought today.... Attributing change to the delivery system or the receiver, instead of the message, might be another interpretation of "God likes change." God likes us to grow in our walk, become more of a lantern to Jesus' light, be born anew, etc.. God likes 'Christ-like' changes in us in our lives that move us closer to Him. It isn't The Great I AM that needs change, it is us. (02/01/07)