Discombobulated: A Meditation on Change

I absolutely can’t stand change. When the winds of change blow, they are sometimes light zephyrs, sometimes modest gales, and occasionally tempestuous typhoons, raging wildly, threatening to suck your entire soul into a whirlwind of destruction. But when I think of change as being like the wind, I realize that it can be a very good thing. I remember running a particularly miserable race last year– it was a pretty hilly course, the temperature was probably somewhere between 100 and 120 degrees, and I happened to be very dehydrated. One of the toughest parts of the course was a ridiculously vast expanse of dry yellow grass that seemed to last forever. But as I turned one of the corners of the field, feeling ready to pass away at any second, a glorious breeze hit me and carried me through the last 800 meters of the race. In that instance, the change was welcome. However, as this absurd Utah weather started to kick in a while later, the previously scorching hot days turned to days of wind and rain. One of our track meets even got canceled halfway through because of the wind. (I’m not complaining.) But at the region track meet, for some odd reason or another, they decided to hold the meet despite multiple tents blowing over. I ran the mile, and I experienced the most horrible, tiring resistance running I’ve ever done. I felt like the wind was working against me in every way, and my time was nearly two minutes slower than usual. Here the wind was my adversary, laughing evilly as it tried to thrust me down into endless misery and woe in the darkest chambers of the Track Black Hole.

As I’ve been thinking about the immense changes that are about to happen in my life, I feel that I’m about to be thrust into the heart of a storm, running against the wind as I try to move forward. But last night I realized that even though almost literally everything in my life is about to change, one thing will remain constant: the Savior. He is always near me, though I do not see Him there, and because He loves me dearly, I am in His watchful care. The most important thing in my life will never change, and I know He is what I can hold onto in this incoming tornado of change. He will calm the storms in my life and turn them into testimony-building and faith-promoting experiences as I become more reliant on Him. And as my cousin Josh said in a recent letter about one of their struggling investigators, “my faith is deeper than my fears.”

So really, I guess it’s just the way you look at the wind. It may just be hurling you forward at an uncomfortably fast speed right into a sunny field of peace, later returning to cool the eventual sweaty heat and sunburn. I say full speed ahead. Actually I don’t.