Cam McVey

Buses, they say, take an age to arrive and then all appear in a bunch together. And so it seems with Change in my life. Of course, we all deal with change as a mat­ter of day-to-day liv­ing. There’s noth­ing unusual about that. The Change that I’m refer­ring to here is the big changes in life and, more spe­cific­ally, when those changes come along together. About four years ago, I had to deal with the arrival of my first-born child, the pur­chase of my first house, the death of my father, being made redund­ant, and start­ing my first busi­ness — all in the space of a few months. It was tough, but in a way that you only fully real­ise after the fact. I got through it, mostly with the aid of faith, friends, prayer and time.

In one way, com­mon sense says spread out the unheaval. Don’t rock the fam­ily boat too much at one time. Take the hits one at a time to dis­perse the pain. I’m not so sure though — I feel all at once is per­haps the best way. Just throw it all at me in a one’r and, “set­ting my face like flint”, I’ll get through it. Being in a con­stant state of big change would be a hard way to live. Sea­sons of con­stance and short storms of massive change per­haps suit me better.

That’s just the­ory, of course. I have no way of really know­ing as I’ve never really had big changes spread out and, to bring us up to date, it looks like another storm is brew­ing. Changes in hous­ing, church, job, income and spir­itual cli­mate has me wide-eyed. I’m faced with the pro­spect of all this change like one sit­ting at the front of a roller­coaster at the ini­tial ratch­ing up. Infact, I’m at the top, faced with the real­ity of what this all means, and the imme­di­acy of it makes for a big inhale and the gulp and tightened grip before the big fall at the start of the ride.

But I’m learn­ing to lean; I’m learn­ing to trust. I’m get­ting bet­ter at see­ing this stuff for what it is. I’m learn­ing to marry up my under­stand­ing with my own cir­cum­stances. I feel more con­fid­ent that everything will be alright. In fact, if I nav­ig­ate in step with Him and remain in Him, I can come out of this much the richer. The oppor­tun­ity for learn­ing and growth is compelling.

So I say bring it on! All the trouble I see brew­ing, when viewed from this per­spect­ive, just become big­ger examples of the “change is good” way-of-life I so espouse. It’s just that there’s more on the line now. But, surely, that means the reward is that much greater.