Here we are, a bit into the new year and trying to take a few slow breaths. 2024 and 2025 were years of tremendous change for my family. We lost both of my parents. My husband and I both retired from the jobs we’d held for many years. We sold the house that had been our home for over a quarter of a century and bought a house in a part of the country neither of us had ever lived in before; yes, two natives of the western United States, who have been living in the Midwest for many years, decided to move to the East Coast. To top it off, we’re sharing the new house with our older son and his wife. There’s more, but I think that gives an idea of why we need a brief break from change.

Much of the change has been good. I am greatly enjoying having time to pursue passions that I never had enough time for as a university professor. Our new home has a huge screened porch and tons of visible wildlife: deer, squirrels, foxes, chipmunks, at least one raccoon, and lots of birds, including at least one hawk. Seeing God’s world on display out back brings us constant joy.

Even so, change is hard and stressful, and we need times of rest. I think of 1 Kings 19, where Elijah sleeps, and the angel wakes him twice to eat, indicating that he needs refreshment, “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you” (1 Kings 19:7b ESV). I think also of the instruction to “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10a ESV). We as human beings need opportunities to stop and rest. We need times of stillness and meditation. We need to stop and take in the sustenance God provides, spiritual and physical.

We need to be careful, however, not to allow those times of rest and recovery to become stagnation, because stagnation is never of God. As we watch God interact with his people, he constantly brings change into their lives.

After Elijah slept and ate, he “went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God” (1 Kings 19:8b ESV). In Abraham’s life, God first called his father to Ur and then called Abraham “to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1b ESV). God shows Moses the burning bush in order to send Moses back to Egypt to get his people. For the next 40 years, Moses goes where God tells him to, despite his initial reluctance. As we work our way through the Old Testament, people are constantly sent to new places and called to new activities. We know Jonah got sent somewhere that he didn’t want to go, but he’s far from the only prophet who was asked to leave home. Most of them were sent somewhere else, often to hostile lands. 

And, of course, Jesus left his own carpentry in Nazareth and called each of his disciples away from their locations and their professions. They were called to wander with Christ for 3 years and then spend the rest of their lives telling people about Jesus – a dangerous activity in that time and place.

If we are God’s people, we have experienced at least one major disruption in our lives, when we became new creations and started that path of living for and with Jesus instead of living a life centered on ourselves. That wasn’t the last change God was bringing to us. We’re not going to become perfect while we’re still on earth, so God is always going to have more to do in our lives. Some of the changes he brings or allows will be dramatic, as many of those in my life have been in recent years. Some will be very small, especially when viewed from the outside. I don’t know what God will bring next to my life when my current season of rest and recovery is over. I certainly don’t know what he has in store for you.

I do know that in periods of rest or waiting, we must always be aware that change is coming, that God has something else in store. We need to be open to whatever that is and work to walk through it with him, keeping our eyes on what is eternal, not on the temporary, even when the temporary is highly uncomfortable.

After all, it’s the change God brings in our lives that allows us to positively impact others. Think how history changes if Abraham doesn’t follow God, if Moses never goes back to Egypt, if Paul doesn’t respond appropriately on the road to Damascus, if Jesus never leaves heaven to come to earth. Our impacts may be smaller, but we may never know for sure. My father left a well-paying computer programming job to become a preacher, never expecting to impact more than a single congregation, but he kept following God’s call to the mission field and then into administrative roles and ended up making huge impacts on many, many lives. In the end, however, what’s important is not numbers; it’s people. And I guarantee that if God is calling for a change in your life, somebody’s life will be impacted for the good.

Let’s be open to God’s changes in our lives and in our churches. Let’s seek to follow him to the “good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10b ESV).

I hope that you will pray for me and my family as we rest and prepare for whatever God has in store for us next, and I would welcome an opportunity to pray for you whether you’re currently in one of those seasons of change, recovering from a season of change, or eagerly awaiting what God is preparing to bring your way.