"Is God a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup?"
-C.S. Lewis
I hear pretty commonly recently, "I'm really bad with transitions."
...well, is anyone really that good with transitions? It is a lot like grieving. You are losing a huge part of yourself, and the part of your life that you have put time and emotional resources into investing.
It's always an interesting and trying season of life, when you go through large transitions in which your entire social life and stability is uprooted and shaken. I suppose it is a blessing that it occurs more seldom and less severely as you age.
It sometimes seems to me a terrible prank of fate that every time things seem to settle down and life seems to get into a smooth and stable rhythm, that the passage of time, growth, and eventually death reintroduces chaos into the balance.
It is often explained that for us to have stability and permanent comfort in this life would make us complacent and would rid in us the longing for Heaven and His kingdom. Or that once we get into a stable rhythm, it's a sign that we've learned our lesson from that phase in life and need to move on. Fine. Let's leave it there for now (I have plenty of thoughts about that itself recently, but I'm afraid they're too chaotic right now to be expressed in a blog).
I realize that people often scramble back to rebuild that which they had lost to transitions, whatever it was before and however the transition happened. We try very hard to go back and restore/replicate our life back to the way it was when we were comfortable and content. The same relationship, same friendship dynamics, same small group, etc.
But I realize that reality never repeats itself. The past would lose its meaning if we could replicate it. And if past were to lose its meaning, so would our lives and our experiences.
I think we, especially those of us who graduated, can fall to thinking that the best times of our lives are behind us now. But we should look forward to the new tunes that our lives are ready to play for us, instead of trying to listen to the same songs over and over. When we walk with the Lord, the best years of our lives are always ahead of us.
