Things change pretty fast...

Over the last year or two I've come to realize that things can change pretty fast, in a moment really. Now most of you probably have learned this already, either from experience or the experiences of others, but for me this has been a new thought, and in many ways, a welcome one.

Growing up I despised change. As a child change represented a disturbance in my happy little life. Often change brought loss. When I was five years old we lived down the street from my grandmother and my aunt. I saw them most every day. I went to ball games with my aunt and sat in my grandmother's kitchen while she cooked. It was perfect. My best friend, a little boy, lived next door to my grandmother. When I wasn't at her house or my own, I was at his. Star Wars toys crammed under his bed with matchbox cars and Tonka trucks in a room that never really let in any light, all the while, the feel of shag carpet all around us.

Then, one day, seemingly out of no-where, we were living five hours away in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I don't remember leaving. I don't remember getting there. I just remember being in the one place and then being in the next place... without my grandma or my aunt or my friend. I went to Kindergarten and made some friends. A few years and a hamster later, I was watching The Brady Bunch in the basement of our house and my parents called me upstairs to tell me something (in the middle of the show!) I was going to have a baby brother or sister. Can I go back to watching Brady Bunch now?

I still wasn't learning or loving the whole "things change" thing.

My brother was born a couple of weeks after I turned nine. A boy! Who knew?! And then, all at once again, we were moving. It was September and I should have been in school, but we were moving to Illinois and we were sleeping in a hotel with my mom, my dad, my screaming baby brother and our dog. We got a new house. I went to school. I didn't make friends at first. We spent four years living there and in the end I had two close friends. I had a place to eat lunch everyday in the crowded lunchroom. It was perfect. On the last day of 7th grade, I called my mom from the pay phone in the hallway to ask if one of my friends could spend the night. My mom was in tears and said tonight wasn't a good night. We were moving. This time, to Virginia and a life of my Dad with a fulltime career in the military. That was sometime in June. My birthday, at the beginning of July was at the Officer's Club on base in Ft. Lee, Virginia. I was 13. I ate a LOT of crab legs that night, but didn't make any friends all summer. School started in the Fall and suddenly I was sitting with all of the cool kids at lunch. I went to school dances and generally "had a life." I was home sick from school one day in November and my mom came in to say "How do you feel about the Netherlands?" I was 13, in 8th grade and had a crush on a boy named Jaime in my Spanish class. I had NEVER thought one thought or had one feeling about the Netherlands... yet. But, we were moving there.

I lived in the Netherlands for 4 1/2 years, I went to college in Tennessee, met Thom, got married, moved to Massachusetts and got my first real job. I still hated change. Hated it! But lived with it. New supervisors. Change in office location. Roll with it. Got pregnant with Kara -- that was a good change -- but I still struggled with every little change along the way. In 2003 when we were making decisions about moving off campus and I was trying to become a Pampered Chef director and I was finishing up my seminary program and we were trying to figure out how to pay our bills -- I hated change to the point of near panic attacks on a fairly regular basis!

In the Spring of 2004, we invited Joanna to stay with us for a few days and that became a year. In the Fall of 2004, I found myself pregnant with Caleb. A light was shifting from dim to bright somewhere in my mind... change happens. Change happens when you're not looking and there's nothing you can do about it.

In the Spring of 2005, I was about six months pregnant with Caleb when this new thinking in my mind started casting light on a variety of subjects. I began to notice that change was happening in every aspect of our lives, literally EVERY aspect -- family, school for Kara, church, jobs, our marriage, Pampered Chef, money, every area I could identify was experiencing massive shifts and changes.

Now it is the Fall of 2006 and I'm still noticing how fast changes happen. A phone call. A letter in the mail. A decision one evening or one morning that seems to come out of no where and changes the course of our lives -- last year it was the evening we said let's begin a job hunt in Nashville this year it was one morning when I said how about we pay off the credit cards like this...! That fast: life changes. When Caleb was three days old I was in the shower and the phone rang. My grandmother had suffered a heart attack. My parents were visiting to see the new baby and, like that, they were at my grandmother's bedside clear across the country. (She's fine, today, praise God.) Last week my Dad had a routine procedure and wound up spending three nights in the hospital. It wasn't on the calendar, but change happens. Somewhere in the Spring of last year, when Thom and I went to the marriage conference and I was pregnant with Caleb and Joanna was moving on to other things and things were changing with Kara's school and our pastor was leaving our church, something in my heart shifted and I realized change happens, it happens fast, its unpredictable and sometimes it's even good.

On Tuesday I got an email from our friends in Massachusetts SWR and QE (and their newborn son SI -- speaking of change!). They were supposed to have moved from Massachusetts to Connecticut last Saturday, but as it turned out from circumstances beyond their control, their plans were changed. I talked on the phone with QE for a while and got all of the details. Then, on Wednesday night I'm sitting in the living room, chatting with my parents, who had stopped by unexpectedly, and the phone rang. It was QE again.. they have some time on their hands and would like to come and see us before they move to Connecticut! When the phone rang I didn't know who it was and then bam: change. Our month that didn't have much in it, suddenly has a great big something to look forward to right there in the middle of it.

You can't fight change. It's gonna happen whether you hate it or not. May as well like it. Sometimes it's a good thing!