CHANGE OR BE CHANGED

Change. In our own Ideal world, we have all the control of how this happens. We dream of how growth looks and add our desires like Pinterest boards to our hearts.

We crave love and find that we need to love Jesus first. We aim for a new look to our bodies and have to deal with the truth that our fear of others rejecting us for our appearance is really just our own dissatisfaction with ourselves, which causes us to project our feelings onto others so we can make sense of what we feel. We want to become our best version and get hit with the realization that we have pleased so many others and never took the time to admit that we are in need of what we are giving. We want to not be so scared to show up as ourselves and get hit with the reality that we are the ones holding ourselves back. We want better but don't want to become it first. We want to be seen but don't want to see. The list goes on. Change or be changed is the truth about life. We can either willingly walk into some form of shattering, wilderness, isolation, self-realization or it will find us. We'll be hit with mirrors everywhere we look. it's our choice to choose to look at ourselves when we notice our behaviors in someone else. if we ignore it, we'll only delay the change for a moment but eventually we'll be walking right into what we tried to pretend wasn't our truth. Change is hard. The moment we reach change we find bliss but only when we learn to not take the wounds and grievances we faced along the way in vain. Change requires full surrender and complete trust in Jesus. We know when we have changed when it sticks. When we know too much to go back, and we don't make ourselves feel bad for accepting what is. When we stop manipulating ourselves into seeing the same brokenness another way for the sake of saving our own ego and heart. I wonder what becomes of us if we stopped running from change and instead embraced it like the season of fall does. To watch something so beautiful be drained of color until it is bare teaches us how to stand firm during our own metamorphosis. Giving us a new maturity to realize it was never our looks that made us secure, it was our will power. We aren't always required to just be resilient, but we are required to be real with ourselves. We have to learn to accept our own realities instead of being in someone else's. The more we accept the clearer we see. We lose sometimes when we agree to change but we always gain more of ourselves during the process. It's not a fair trade at times but, it's a necessary one.

Isaiah 43: 18-19 ERV

"So don't remember what happened in earlier times. Don't think about what happened a long time ago, because I am doing something new! Now you will grow like a new plant. Surely you know this is true. I will even make a road in the desert, and rivers will flow through that dry land."