On Life Changes

How to navigate moving through major life changes

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Nearly all of my hardest times in life have come around major life changes: moves, graduations, losses, transitions, births, and so on. Several times they have sent me spiraling. Even times which should be purely positive and exciting often felt overwhelming and daunting. Graduation was a moment of accomplishment and opportunity, but also the loss of community and friends and the obligation to do something new and important. The birth of my children were moments of joy and excitement, but also tremendous responsibility. I sometimes struggled to find the joy in these moments because of the weight of the consequences of life changes. I’ve grown a lot in the last few years, and I believe I’ve learned how to accept the burden of change and responsibility along with the joy of the new, but it hasn’t been easy. Life changes are not easy. They often involve goodbyes, re-evaluations of ourselves, and new responsibilities and duties. You wake up for days uncertain of who you are because you have lost your frame of reference or gained a new frame that doesn’t quite fit right. How do you navigate major life changes with dignity and rectitude? How do you handle the severing pain of loss when you must restart your life? The contemporary world gives us few grounding elements that help us remember who we are and what our obligations and freedoms are. To endure and flourish through life changes requires us to ground ourselves in truths about our relation to God that last beyond our shifting circumstances.

Major life changes are difficult because they disrupt our sense of self and our orientation toward the world.

A move robs us of our old community, which includes not only friends, but a church and various responsibilities and liberties that a community provides. This is a severing. It usually hurts. When my wife and I first moved from California to Texas to attend graduate school at Baylor, a wiser old man tried to assuage my fears of losing community by telling us that we weren’t losing friends. That they would always be our friends. And that has been true, mostly. Our friends in California continue to be good friends, but what he didn’t warn us about was the loss. Practically, they could not be the friends who talked to us daily. They couldn’t be the friends who met and prayed with us weekly, as we used to do when we lived in California. Yes, they remain our friends, but there was a substantial loss when we moved. And it has been that way with other friends in other places when we had to move again. It hurts. Part of that hurt is the loss of human connection. You miss people you loved. You miss brothers and sisters in Christ. And while you will go on to make new friends in other places, they can’t replace those friendships. That’s not how love works. There will always be a piece of you with those old friends.

But another part of the loss is the loss of identity and orientation. We know ourselves and our place in the world through our social connections and the responsibilities that come with them. In the case of the friendships we moved from in California, we had responsibilities to meet with them weekly to study the Word and pray together, to bear each others’ burdens, to comfort and build each other up. To live together as believers. When we moved, we could no longer reasonably carry those responsibilities. They had to carry on without us and we had to find a new community to bear our burdens, which is never easy. It’s disorienting. You feel like you have lost your place, and in a sense, you have. The contemporary world, with all the moving and shuffling around it demands of us, involves so many departures like this.

There are other kinds of major life changes, as I pointed out earlier: births, deaths, breakups, divorces, graduations, and so on. And each of these involves this sense of disorientation, which is not always a bad experience, but is always a challenging experience. Sometimes we need to go through a breakup in order to heal. And that process of feeling disoriented is actually the process of re-orienting ourselves rightly toward God, perhaps in the sense of selfless self-preservation! Because in some cases, the situations we are in are not healthy, God-honoring, or flourishing, and we need to make a change. We’ll still feel out of place as we learn to find ourselves in a new place. But this is the pain of growth and healing as we unlearn old responsibilities that weren’t really our responsibilities, and we learn new freedoms that are true, as we discover who we really are in Christ!

Regardless of whether the change is from a bad situation to a good one or from a good situation to another good one, what is required of us is courage and a grounding in our relation to Christ. For many of us, any major change in our lives is going to feel like our world is being shattered. When in reality, this is just another step in our life. We long for permanence in this life, security in our identity and place in the world, but this side of Paradise everything is in flux. People change. The world turns. Friends move. That longing for eternal security is not wrong. It’s a longing for God! And we have eternal security in him. Part of that security involves the assurance that we are secure in him! Our purpose, our identity, and our fundamental responsibilities in life remain constant because they are defined by God. Yes, the details of our identity and responsibilities and even purpose will be shaped by where we live and who else we belong to, but fundamentally, the core is defined by our belonging to God. And when we remember that, we can move or accept change with confidence because our relation to God and our duties to him are not changing!

But that eternal perspective is hard to grasp when everything in this life feels like it is shifting under our feet. I understand that. And loss still hurts and change is still hard. There is nothing wrong with mourning the loss of community or with feeling the struggle to accept change. What is asked of you in these moments, I believe, are two things:

First, you must remember who you belong to. You belong to God. And so your place, your identity, your hope, your worth, your future, and your purpose is eternally secure no matter what change comes about. Allow the change to happen. You are safe.

Second, have courage. Because you belong to God, you can and should have courage. Endure the change. If you have moved, look for a new community to belong to. Have courage to make new friends. Have courage to date again. Have courage to enjoy life. Have courage to trust God with your old friends. Have courage to trust that your freedoms in him are true. Have courage to apply for a new job. Have the courage to be excited about looking for a new job or being a new parent or living in a new city or finding new friends. Because you are safe and secure in Christ! Yes, hard times will come. They come for all of us. And change will come. But the eternal security you are looking for is already yours in Christ. And nothing will change that. So have courage and accept change.