Anticipating change half the battle
Man, I don’t like change. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: I feel so much better when my life has routine. I like the regularity. I like knowing, with as much certainty as possible, what to expect from my days. I like consistency. I also like being prepared for contingencies.
That is one reason why the idea of changing jobs has been such a scary proposition for me. The farm store that I have called my second home for much of the past decade has been good to and for me. My co-workers are like a second family, and almost as dysFUNctional as my biological one. The store’s customers have become like friends, whose lives I’ve followed and become connected to. I have prayed for – and been prayed over – by these very people.
However, I was recently offered a really good opportunity that makes a lot of sense for my family in our current life stage. So, beginning this week, I will be working somewhere different than I have for the past eight years, and in an industry completely unrelated to agriculture. Big changes.
This makes me very nervous.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m incredibly excited for the opportunity. I’m grateful to be able to continue to come alongside my husband in a way that supports our family’s needs. Still, I am stepping way, way outside of my comfort zone, and am now trying to establish a totally new routine.
But life in general isn’t really that secure anyway, is it? I mean, unexpected things happen every minute of every day. From the mundane (the weathermen are often wrong, aren’t they?) to more serious things like car accidents, bad diagnoses, and premature deaths, the possibility for things going off track are endless.
In Sunday school this past weekend, we discussed this very topic. How this desire to know things and be prepared for them is not new. How, for thousands of years, people have tried to see the future. Astrology, divination, palm reading – you name it and people have tried it. It is a human desire to know our futures and control our lives.
It just isn’t possible. There is no way to know with any certainty what a given day will hold. In trying to do so, I think we can drive ourselves crazy. I know, because I have done it to myself. I have spent hours looking at possible outcomes for conversations I have needed to have, all the ways that a potential scenario can go wrong, and all the reasons why I should or should not go somewhere.
And then, something totally unexpected happens that made the choice simple enough to make the time I spent worrying about it seem foolish. And I’m reminded then, like I was in Sunday school, that God will work it all out in a way that he deems best. And trying to fight that is definitely pointless.
So, as I navigate this new path, I am going to remind myself (probably daily for a while) to be less focused on the possible outcomes and to simply trust God to lead me.
He’s never let me down before.