Winds of Change

President Barak Obama ran on a campaign of change. Things have indeed change, during his administration. I won't go into details, but every thinking person will readily admit that some of the changes we have experienced as a nation, over the last few year,s have been good, others not so much. That's to be expected of any presidency. Ours is too complex a system for any one person to have, and use, enough power to do much good or harm by himself (or herself). 

Most of the time, that's a positive aspect of what the Founding Fathers set in motion 236 years ago.

Change. All kinds of changes in the wind as I sit here and peck at my laptop on a 4th of July. There are changes in health - people improving, people dying. Changes in jobs ahead, friends not knowing what or where they will be in two years, much less in 20. Changes in relationships.

So many changes in relationships, you'd think my friends, family, and acquaintances were trying out for a reality show, not trying to keep it together. I could count all the folks I know who are having relationship issues at this very moment but it would take too many fingers, and longer than I want to sit here.

If it sounds like I am writing as if I were on the outside looking in, smug in my own securities and righteousness, that isn't the case. I have my own share of troubled relationships - family members who won't speak to me, family members I'm pretty pissed off at myself; friends and family to whom I need to be closer; acquaintances who should be friends, friends who should stay acquaintances, kept at arms' length for various reasons. Some relationships are rock solid, but a precious few. 

Life can be so messy, can't it?

In the next few months, I predict (Ha! What's the advantage of predicting what everyone already knows?) that we will see increasingly negative dialogue from both the Romney and Obama camps. And there will be, within the same time frame, celebrities embroiled in various and sundry, public and tawdry, displays of relationships in flux. Marriages will fail, jobs will end, countries will reach the brink of disaster and manage to pull out one more time before falling into the abyss. On the positive side, rifts will heal, new relationships will begin, babies will be born, careers will be launched. Changes can be so very good, as well.

Andy Griffith
June 1, 1926 - July 3, 2012
Is there an American whose life
 was NOT touched by this man?

Change is part of life, as surely as digestion is part of the human body. Sometimes change is a good thing - like moving back to Florida was for me last year. Sometimes it is negative - a loved one exchanging a new addiction for an old one finally conquered, for example. Or a death that moves us, far out of proportion to our actual knowledge of the deceased. Or a death that moves us because we were so intimately acquainted. 

The problem is that with all the changes, we often....I often....lose sight of the fact that everything is always changing. Children are constantly growing older, as are parents. Minds are always maturing, or lapsing into more immaturity. Relationships are always growing closer together, or further apart. There is no time in our lives when life is stagnant. It may appear so at times. We may hope for that, at times. But it never happens.

We never "arrive." Not as a nation, not as a marriage, not as families or companies or friendships. There is never a time when we can just enjoy a deep sigh and relax that NOW we don't have to work so much. NOW we can let things slide. NOW we can enter into a rest.

Uh oh. Doesn't the Bible say something about that? Yes, I'm sure of it. There IS a rest that we are supposed to, as Christians, enter. A ceasing of labor. Of work. Of striving. And it is not just by doing nothing, but by actively letting go of the ropes and tethers and chains and ladders by which we thought we might attain goodness or right standing or an "in" with God.

The work is done. "It is finished," Jesus said on the cross. Nothing you can do, nothing I can do, will make us more saved, if we trust in that finished work of the cross. Nothing, conversely, we can do or say contrary to God's will, can mess it up. We can mess up our own lives, mess up relationships, but we are not powerful enough....like our President amidst a complex system of checks and balances....to screw it up forever.

I could tell you who I want to win in the November election. I could tell you who I think WILL win. I could tell you where I hope to be in five years' time, tell you who I think will stay married and who won't, tell you all kinds of things. But I won't. Change can be a tricky thing, shifting at the last possible moment. Life often looks just the opposite of "God is in control."  When it does, the temptation is to jump in and make things happen, which creates a whole different set of changes but rarely the end-all solutions for which we had hoped.

None of these human, earthly changes is so big that it will upset God's plans, however. And, in case you have forgotten, his plans are much bigger than who is president of the United States, or who is married to whom, or what job you get...or lose. The Big Plans will prevail. The little ones don't matter nearly as much as we'd like to believe.

And then again, it is one of those great paradoxes. The Creator of the universe who has vast plans...counts the hairs on our heads. Feeds the birds of the field. In one sense, we need not worry about even the tiniest details of our lives, because he is SO concerned about them....and in another, we need not worry, because we are such tiny specks in the vastness of eternity past, present, and future.

Too much on a 4th of July! I think I need another glass of wine. Enjoy the fireworks!