Well, you changed, and that hurt
Relationships change, and I’m learning this is one of the hard things in life.
There’s the obvious changes - death and estrangement - but I’m finding the gradual changes to be their own special challenge. The death of a friend or loved one might suck our breath away, but life is filled with a thousand relational deaths that peck at our minds and hearts with ongoing sadness.
We make a new friend and think they’ll be there forever - until they aren’t. For years, our kids live in our homes and relate to us a certain way - until they don’t. We serve and minister and pray with someone nearly every week until a silent drift happens - and we don’t even know why. If these relationships were meaningful to us, the change is often accompanied with grief - maybe not the kind we feel standing next to a casket, but perhaps like wistfulness for a good memory from our childhood. We know it was good, we suddenly realize there’s no way to get back to the experience of it, and we’re not sure when exactly that inaccessibility became the case. When did the sounds, smells, and colors of that memory become out of reach? When did they become something we identify as “past”?
The Imperceptible Change Within
Maybe more significant than the changing of our surroundings is the imperceptible, internal changes that only reveal themselves when they eventually manifest in our relationships, either suddenly or over time. Some of these shifts are negative - something the Scriptures would identify as sin. Perhaps they are the kind of desires that when fully grown produce quarrels and can mean the death of relationships, or as history shows, even the death of people themselves (James 1:1). Other shifts are the bad fruit of cultivated patterns emerging from trauma or unforgiveness that grow from the subconscious rot of bitterness in our own souls.
But some internal changes are good. God’s grace may mean the discarding of an unhelpful emotional pattern, a reckoning with the truth about ourselves or another, a response of quiet confidence instead of frantic anxiety, or the ability to risk and trust in new ways. In following Jesus, we’re turning every day from emotional maps and tools that maybe served us once but serve us no longer. This is some of what the Scriptures and theologians have called sanctification, which is in part the process of us being made holy (Hebrews 10:14) even when we’ve already been made the same (1 Corinthians 1:2).
This ongoing work of sanctification means we sometimes wake up and suddenly realize we aren’t who we once were. Jesus has changed us. We aren’t so dependent, so anxious, so needful for attention, so angry. We feel less insecure and much more aware of what is untrue and true. It may feel like the world has changed around us, but we have actually changed within. The One who began a good work in us was working for years, sometimes even beneath our consciousness, to work in us His own fullness - to bring us closer to completion in Him (Philippians 1:6).
I’m learning this good kind of change, not just the negative kind, also manifests in relationships in challenging ways. Maybe I’m less dependent, so I might not reach out as much - and this might hurt you. I might not feel as responsible for that uncontrollable circumstance, so I might not try to respond anymore - and this feels like abandonment to you. Maybe before I needed that support from you, but now God has provided it elsewhere - and you miss the role you once played in my life. Maybe you even received some kind of emotional consolation from the role you played for me. I can remember times when leading and serving with a particular person or team was everything to me, and now it’s just not. There’s no conflict to necessarily be found that caused all this. We all just grew up a bit.
And while all this changing may happen without a drastic event or even a conversation between us - there’s no funeral service to be found - I’m finding it can nonetheless manifest in me as grief. For me at least, that grief can even feel like anger. It’s not so much anger at people but anger at change. Weren’t the good times back then when we remember? And why did they have to go away?
They were good, but probably not that good. There were probably so many good things. But what if back then we were also less connected to reality - God’s reality - and maybe even less whole? There’s good things to remember and laugh about, but what if in those times our unhealthy emotional patterns rather than our health found refuge in one other? The present might feel more painful right now, but hopefully it’s also more real. If it feels good to look back, maybe that’s in part because God was back there too - meeting us and holding us even in our dysfunction and ignorance. But that must mean He’s here now and in the future doing the same.
All of this - the inward and outward changes of life that manifest in new relational dynamics - has made me think about the choices we have in receiving or resisting change in each other. As I mentioned, I know I sometimes resist it with grief that turns into anger. Some of that may just be the normal, productive process of grieving, but I also know the deeper I crawl down that tunnel of resistance, the more constricted and heavy I feel. Sometimes I’ve crawled so far into anger I can tell it’s an endless and dark maze of its own.
Eventually, when the tunnel is too dark and long, I realize I need the air and sunlight again. I’ll never find what I’m looking for down there. There’s no relief down there. Resistance is futile. When I can grieve, yes, and get angry, yes, but then receive the memories of the past and the changes of the present with gratitude, I somehow find a path that leads to new space above ground. It’s an unknown path, a scary one, but eventually I can breath again and begin to see new possibilities. The relationships look different here, but God is still in them. I can’t stay where I was - in that angry, endless hole - but it turns out there’s new places to discover. In these new relational realities, I begin to look back on the lost things with gratitude and hope again for the future.
Change and Stability
The intensity with which I sometimes feel all this internal change is sometimes heightened by living in a community of people that has embraced stability as a value. We’ve learned it from our Benedictine friends in Aliquippa. Stability means in part we believe that staying put is sometimes exactly what our growth and sanctification needs. For all this talk of constant change, I’ve been doing ministry with some of the same people for one or even two decades in the same town. I live on the same street I did when I first got married. My grandparents said their wedding vows to one another in a now torn down Methodist church at the end of this very city block I call home. My local ministry people and I (and apparently saints thought history) have believed this kind of non-rushed, long-term rootedness is somehow good for our souls. We believe it’s good, in part, because if we stay put long enough we sometimes find God in the very place where we already are. There He was and now is, right under our noses the whole time.
When I was younger I’m not sure I could see it - how this staying in one place actually rubs like sandpaper on wood against the changes we can’t stop - the changes inside you and me. Maybe Babylon’s refusal to stay still actually makes it so we don’t notice the change in one another. For Babylon, salvation lies in going on to the better and bigger thing, only to be disappointed there as well. But what if sometimes in the constant moving, we escape what God is saying and doing as well? When I run from the change in you, maybe I’m actually running from Him.
Still, I’m not sure how to actually stick with one other if we’re constantly changing. I’m no longer the same person my wife married. And my friends aren’t exactly who I chose to be with when we first started serving together in Aliquippa. My neighbors have all changed on my street even though I’ve known some of them for years. My kids are becoming more mature, and my dog is no longer a puppy. Some of our collective changing might have been for the worse, but some of it was for the better - like how my kids are becoming more independent but that means they need me less and sometimes this makes me sad.
If you keep changing, how am I to keep choosing you? What of this new, strange work of grace that has come between us? How does our friendship endure it? What if your growth means I actually have a harder time being around you?
I Chose a Story, Not Just You
The answer might be in this rootedness that is paradoxical to change. I observe it in my monkish neighbors. My Benedictine friends have lived, served, and prayed with each other in close quarters for decades now. They certainly aren’t exactly who they once were at the beginning of this journey. That would be impossible. They, like us all, have been shaped by Jesus in the joys, trials, and losses of life. That inevitably means change. So how have they endured the changing in one another for decades?
I’m not exactly sure, but I have a feeling my friends didn’t sign up for each other. Not exactly. They signed up for something that transcended all of them. In fact, they covenanted to it. They signed up for a community - but not just some idealistic version of community built on affinity and shallow friendships. They signed up for God in a particular place with particular people - and they believed they’d keep finding Him in their experience of one other. And they believed this community was somehow at its best just a shadow of a greater story where God is present among us in the New Jerusalem. And then, when they were tempted to disbelieve the shadow, they kept praying about the New Jerusalem and acting it out together in their meals and liturgy and ministry until they believed in the future once again.
Somehow, their commitment endured because it wasn’t simply to one another or even to the earthly story they experienced together. It was to a future story - one they continuously sang about and acted out in their presence among the poor. Maybe when we choose something greater than one another, we can choose one another for longer.
They believed, and I want to as well, that it’s possible to dance in constant motion within this larger, constant story of grace. God’s grace moves in and around us in the context of something bigger that doesn’t fundamentally change. I’m coming to understand this because of the covenant I made with my wife. We committed to something that actually transcended both of us. We didn’t sign up for each other only; we signed up for the larger story we’d make together - or reflect together - in our marriage. The story we’d make together was situated in the even larger story that God designed where the mystery of marriage is somehow a reflection of Jesus’ mysterious union with the Church. It’s so big. That’s why it’s been at least possible to endure so much of the best and worst of one another. We change in each other’s presence year by year, but hopefully we signed up for something greater. Something cosmic. Something epic. Something that has possibility for fuller joy with the passing of time and fullness of joy in eternity.
Choosing the Story
It’s not really about our marriages - is it - or the people I live and do ministry with here in Aliquippa. Jesus told us marriage won’t be a thing in the resurrection (Matthew 22:30). It’s not forever. I imagine the community I experience here in Aliquippa will only feel like an echo in heaven. All we have now in our relationships are echos of the future. Marriage and friendships and family - even with all its joys - are somehow reflecting the fullness of a better story from a better future city.
That’s what we signed up for. It’s what I signed up for when I married Chelsea. It’s what our friends signed up for when they joined us here in Aliquippa. It’s what my Benedictine friends chose when they said yes to one other. None of us probably knew it at the time, but we were saying yes to that better, bigger story. It’s a story that transcends the ways we hurt, disappoint, or even outgrow each other. It’s the story we forgive each other within, it’s the story we for a time say goodbye to each other within, it’s the story we all grow and fail within, and it’s the story we’re staying put in. Even when everything changes. Even when we change.
Because of that story, I don’t need you to stay the same person forever. Please don’t betray me or lie to me or steal from me, but even if you do, it won’t change the larger story. It won’t shake the foundations in New Jerusalem. Also, I’d like to be able to celebrate when you grow, maybe even when you outgrow me. When I don’t understand you anymore, I’d like to resist assuming that something bad is happening. Maybe something good is happening. When it’s necessary, I’d like to tearfully accept with joy that it’s better for you to now relate to me differently - maybe even for me to send you on to the next place in your journey.
Also, I can’t be unchanging for you - even if you’ve really come to depend on that thing I do or that role I play. Jesus is doing too much within me - way more than you can see. I’m going to change like you will. But still, we’re part of a bigger story. Jesus’ story. Sometimes I might move on from you without ever really moving on. I might call less, and we might not see each other as much. Maybe I’m not as close to you as I once was. But it doesn’t make untrue the story we find ourselves in. There’s something bigger going on. Something that can’t be changed.
We should grieve the change and growth in each other, yes. It can hurt. You may outgrow me, or I might outgrow you in some way - a way of being, serving, or eating with one another. But a better description for the sorrow and anger mixed together might be longing. “God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:8). I have a feeling that communities that long have the potential at least to be communities that last because our grief, even our failings, can become the opportunity to want something greater together. Even when my longing can’t be fulfilled with you, it just points to the longer I have for Him.
Our experience of change in one another might just be the persistent, aching echo of New Jerusalem.
