And yet, and yet…

I never thought it would change.

Coming back from roads that I’ve traveled many times before, through Aledo and Fort Worth where I grew up to Arkansas where my dad’s family is from, I felt a strange sense of weight in my heart. In the space of life that I now live in with kids growing up and ministry speeding along, change is a constant. No day is the same, and the majority of my labors seems to be adapting to new inputs and variables. The world I usually live in is characterized by a neverending cycle of change.

But when traveling back to my places of origin, and further into the rural roads of my grandparents, it has always been a place where things more or less stayed the same. The same smells, the same cawing crows, the same jokes from my Grampy, the same overwhelmingly delicious Thanksgiving dinner, the same mist laying over quiet fields in the mornings, the same complaints about Cowboys and Razorback football. But now as time moves on, the places that never changed are changing. The road outside my home that was always so large in my mind is smaller than I remember.

Changes in those places hit hard. Despite our best intentions, I come to rely on the fact that there will always be that dirt road through the woods to my my grandparents’ house. In a way, our hearts depend on the cawing of the crows on the welcomes coming through screen doors. People tend to think that grief just comes from bad news. That is only partially true.

The purest form of grief comes from change.

There is a certain level of grief we experience every time we step onto a road that we knew that now we don’t know. We grieve because we used to lean upon that memory, that person, that place, and it is no longer there. Like a phantom limb, our hearts and minds have a difficult time recognizing this kind of change. While we know that the river of time constantly flows onward, we still hold on hope that the islands of our youth will still be there.

I don’t write these things today to be sorrowful. I’ve recently been convicted of my tendency to place unrealistic and undefined expectations on most of the areas of my life, and as a result to be left disappointed or downcast. Where there are no actual goals, there can be no actual contentment.

Change is grief, and yet change is life. Our bodies only grow and thrive and live because of change. It is the areas of stagnation that begin to reek of death. For us to cling to the things that were without allowing that which is and that which will be signals the beginning of an end for us.

So as I stand on a road that I know was once bigger, I marvel that the Lord has given me grace to stand on this road today. And if this road was large in my memory, how much larger do I stand in the eyes of my children than I think I do? How much grace am I given to provide a large road for those who are to come, for those who are to believe, to travel? Change is grief, change is life, change is privilege.

So yes, I will grieve some over those diminishing dirt roads, but I praise God for them. I will praise God for the marvel of my youth. I will praise God for the faithfulness of my family and those pillars that will pass on before me. I will praise God for tears that have not yet been shed because they will carry heavy meaning. I will praise God because he’s not finished yet with my family, my home, my life, and yet that he has finished the work that will one day beckon us to our real home in eternity with him.

I never thought it would change, but praise God that we do.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, the new has come. 2 Corinthians 5:17