How Change Happens

Do you ever feel like a lump of clay?  Like a New Testament chunk of earth waiting to see what it will be made into?  I do.  Most of the time I find life to be pushing on me and I am pushing back.  I'm not a happy-go-lucky kind of person, I'm not meloncholy like my husband, but I stand somewhere in between that.  I think I'm a fighter.  Not in the violent, boxer girl sort of way.  More in that I sense so much in life trying to change me that I need to stand my ground.  As a parent, a mother in particular, I feel this very acutely.  Not only have I seen my body physically tousled like the sea as it grows and shrinks regularly with childbearing, but to then have small, strong willed children that lean constantly on me not just to meet their needs, but to also help them grow often feels like some new shape is being pressed into my heart and soul.

Growth takes challenges, we challenge our minds and our hearts and our families to grow.  Growth means change, and both growth and change can be uncomfortable.  My 6 year old lives in this dynamic very loudly.  One minute he is so independent, and the next he wants to cuddle up and be my little baby again.  He is growing, changing, becoming.  Watching it happen so closely and so openly- he can't hide his feelings for anyone - I see what the New Testament talks about.  He's a lump of clay.  Yes, he came into this world shaped a certain way, and there is a stubbornness to him that I know will never, and should never change, but within that shape new contours can still be added, or revised, softened or hardened.  Somehow seeing it happen to someone else makes me look back and see those moments in my own life.  I have always felt a bit uncertain about the shape (I am speaking personality, emotionality) I came to life in, things about myself I know I cannot change, but seem to be just who I am, good or bad.  But then I see how circumstances have come about, disappointments, and achievements, griefs, and rejoicing that have led me to be who I am now.  And I want to lay on my back with my arms out by my side, feel the pressure of growth, and let change happen.  I want to be clay, being clay means endless possibilities are present, it means we can be made new, it means we are not stuck in the patterns of life we have always followed.  It is hope.  Our children are full of potential, full of hope, so are we.  We may have outgrown the tantrums (some of us) of childhood, but we can still be stretched, we can still live open to being remade.