Yesterday I spent some time with Eric’s grandma. She’s had a rough year. Grandpa passed away in March. He was 93, and they’d been married almost 65 years. Now she lives with her son and daughter-in-law. Her macular degeneration makes her basically blind, and she can’t hear well either. She sits in an unfamiliar house unable to easily participate in life there and with nothing to do. And she misses Grandpa, their house, the life she used to have.
I tried to encourage her, but honestly, change is just plain hard. It means tears. It means dealing with new things you never wanted to have to face. It means people not understanding (or caring about) what you want or need. It’s just hard.
I’m still working through the reverberations of our move last year. I’m not settled here. Our new house is under construction in our backyard as I type this, but home is more than a house. I’m not necessarily sorry we moved, but I still have no sense of community, of belonging here. Change is hard.
Erin has been struggling with Kindergarten. She loves it while she’s there. But she is always concerned that she’s missing something. So at school, she worries she’d be having more fun at home. If she goes somewhere, she wishes she had stayed. She can’t choose a candy bar because she won’t find out until after she eats it that she might have wanted the other one more. She’s struggling with the change, with having to do (for her) a more mature thing and keep going, whether she misses something fun here or not. That is hard.
And parenting the twins is hard, too. We’ve changed from me being with them constantly (which has its own set of problems) to me NOT being with them some each day. I have to rely on their version of reality, on their ability (or lack thereof) to explain to me what happened to them while I wasn’t there. I have to trust their teachers (and I do, thankfully) to manage their experiences and let me know if things need addressed. But parenting from farther away is hard. And the change in parenting styles is hard, too.
I’m not really sure what all of this means. I don’t have any great answers. Change is hard. We don’t like it. I don’t like it. But I also know that it’s the only way I can grow and be different than I am right now. So there is tension between dealing with change and avoiding it. And the tension is hard, too.
I guess that’s why we do better to simply focus on today. On finding God (and thanking Him) right here, for just today. Grandma’s focus on the past is part of her grieving process, but it keeps her from moving forward. Erin’s fear of the future keeps her from enjoying right now. I need to learn from them both.
Lord, help me to trust you, to accept change and live today to its fullest, through Your Spirit and power. Let my life, with all its changes, be marked with Your presence – because You never change.
