By Amy Butler
Some things never change, or so they say.
I don’t know if that statement is true, but I do know that if some things never change, life is not one of those things. Oh no. The older I get the more I know that life is one of those strange things in which you go, day in and day out, living the same life you were living yesterday, you think. Until, one day, you look up and everything has changed.
Approximately 18 and a half years ago I found myself in a hospital room, bags packed, ready to go home and thinking: “I cannot believe they are going to let me walk out of here with this child. I have no idea what to do with him.”
Hours of floor pacing in the middle of the night, years of toddler-chasing, lots of first days of school, exhausting birthday parties, potential parental heart attacks while watching him learn to drive — it all seemed like I was living the same old life, one day at a time, one right after the other. Then I blinked, it feels like, and everything changed. I leave next week to take that little baby and his size 13 tennis shoes off to college for his first semester.
How could this be?
I was thinking about all of this the other day, simultaneously relieved that the child has lived to see this day and at the same time swiping at errant tears. What is wrong with me? As I have reflected these past weeks on all the change going on in life around here, a verse from Isaiah keeps coming to mind.
This one has been implanted in my memory for years; it was one we had to memorize in Vacation Bible School in between gluing pieces of macaroni to construction paper: “The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God will stand for ever.” (Isaiah 40:8)
My memory of this verse is limited to Bible drills, so I did some investigating and found that the writer of First Peter quotes this verse in his letter of exhortation and encouragement to folks who had become followers of Jesus and suddenly realized that everything in their lives had changed.
One day they were living their lives and the next thing they knew they were part of a fledgling movement sweeping the world, the focus of persecution and abuse. The writer of First Peter wrote to encourage them even as they faced big, big changes.
If I may take liberties with exactly what he said in Chapter One, I suspect that the writer of First Peter was agreeing with me: life is all about change. But, curiously, he frames this truth with a call to love one another, earnestly and from the heart. And he says this is possible because, while it may seem that everything changes, there is one thing that does not. The love of God, planted deep within us and radiating out to those around us, never changes.
I am still working to figure out how all of this fits into our family process of packing bags and hauling stuff into the freshman dorm. It continues to feel more to me like “some things never change” should be removed from our English vernacular and officially replaced with “everything changes constantly, and don’t forget it because one day you think you know what life is like and then you look up and your kid is going to college,” or something like that.
I may not, in fact, be able to completely eliminate the phrase “some things never change” from the English language. And despite the shocking change my life is currently exhibiting, I’m not really sure we should.
I think the writer of First Peter has a point, that even in the face of withering and fading and growing and shifting, and, yes, even heading off to college, there are some things that never change. Love. The love of God never changes.
Life always changes. But maybe it’s the love of God that becomes the love we nurture for each other that never does; the deep and abiding ties of God’s love stay, no matter how life changes.
I believe it, I do. So here’s hoping that conviction gets me through goodbye.