Embrace change. It’s something I’m simply not comfortable with, well, not fully. Change is daunting, facing the unknown. It’s uncomfortable leaving the comfort of what is. However, change is all about. This existence is change; around us and in us, change is occurring. Change, in the violence of breaking atomic bonds and the gentle whisking away of one season giving way to the next, is occurring constantly. Change is unescapable.

“Everybody has to change, or they expire.” — Donald Miller

Refusing to change, we deny a core aspect of our existence here. From the moment we are conceived, change begins rapidly taking control over us for the next nine months. This pace is upheld throughout the first few years of our lives, but at some point I decided I was done with change. At some point, I convinced myself that a being borne of change could eventually stop. How can something so imperfect just stop changing? However, that choice isn’t entirely up to me.

Change is a way of life. Regardless of my thoughts toward or against it, change is happening to me perpetually. There is some change over which I have control, but there is a significant portion that I simply do not. This is where we dip our feet into the pool of free will and I leave the topic at assuring you I believe in free will, but with roughly seven billion people on the planet, externalities (to borrow an economics term) are inevitable, as well as our being affected by them.

Even science backs me up here. Remember that law that says mass is neither created nor destroyed? Therefore, for people to be introduced into this world, there must be some matter being reappropriated to make room for this birth.

There is only One who is unchanging. Going back to my statement of imperfection, we change because we’re imperfect. God doesn’t change, He’s the only who doesn’t change, because He alone is perfect. We change because no one was meant to be perfect, but perfect_able_. This is where my desire to retire from change falls short. Sure, there are the Darwinian concerns of adaptation to a changing environment, but I consider those temporal. The fact is, we were all meant to change as we were born from a rapid series of changes that slows over the course of time, but are still ever-present. To deny change is to deny the One who created life. In this way, I am Peter, the scared disciple who denied Jesus three times the night before He was arrested, cowardly and dangerously subversive. Friend, don’t let yourself follow me down this path. Embrace change.