Take Another Step

I’m sitting on my sister’s bed typing at the moment. She’s watching a video on facial peels, Jenn’s watching a documentary in her bed. And all I can do is silently grieve.

Don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly excited to move forward towards marrying Andrew in just 3 weeks from today. I am thrilled to pieces to be starting this next chapter of life with my HUSBAND in our little house we’re soon going to call home. (I worried that our engagement was too short, but it feels like it has been dragging on for ions!) Yet, there’s a piece of me that is grieving. These girls are my family. I won't get to see them every day like I have for a long time. 

Change has and will never be easy for me. I don’t think it is for a lot of people, but I think it’s harder for some than for others. In some way, we can grieve because we’ve enjoyed the times we’ve had in the past, and we don’t want them to end. We’ve had wonderful memories with people we love, and we tend to take those for granted. And as I’m sitting on my sister’s bed two nights before she and Jenn move out of this apartment into their own, I’m bracing for impact; everything will change in the next few weeks. They’ll move out Monday evening (and also gradually transporting things throughout the week), I’ll move out next Saturday, Andrew will move out of his place the next Saturday and into our new home, and the next week we’ll be MARRIED. Oh my word.

I’ve already had to deal with an incredible amount of change recently, in preparing for this new shift in life. Andrew and I have been learning a lot in our premarital counseling, we’re learning how to put the other first, learning how to live with each others’ habits and quirks, and our likes/dislikes. Friends are gradually growing apart, from me and each other, onto their own new stages of life. There is an ever-growing mountain of moving boxes in our living room and in my bedroom… I will be bound in marriage to one person the rest of my life. I’m not going to rely on my parents for things anymore, or anyone else but my husband. I’m planning a wedding, and all of the nitty gritty details that go with it in the last month or so. I’m attempting to take care of myself by putting myself on a diet of portion control. I’m making all of these decisions and yet I still find myself no more in control than a puppy on a leash.

These are all good things I’m involved in and doing. However, the closer the wedding approaches, the more I find myself wanting to slam on the brake pedal and slooooowww dowwwwnn.

For not liking change at all, I’m sure getting a lot of it recently.

Change brings growth. Change is beautiful, at least it can be. Change is inevitable. So why do I resist it so much?

I grow too comfortable with where I am. We all cling to what is comfortable, because we don’t have to work at it. No pain, no gain is the old saying that definitely means something. There is no growth where there is no change.

Why do I still cling to the comfortable things, kicking and screaming, if I know this? Because I am flawed, I am human. We only know what we’ve experienced. We don’t naturally trust in anything we haven’t done or experienced before. I keep thinking of the quote by C.S. Lewis:

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

If there were no change, there would be no changing of the seasons. There would be no new life. There would be no way of gaining salvation. There would be no way to spend sweet eternity with our heavenly Father.

Even though change is hard, I have to keep going. I just have to "take another step" as the Steven Curtis Chapman song encourages us to do.

Hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll have as few breakdowns as possible... Here's to the new stage of life that Andrew and I am about to leap into as husband and wife!