Be the Change

I am a medical nut. I read way too much. I like to think that I am an amateur doctor. Years ago, I read a story about a star player of a high school basketball team who developed an unusual medical condition: blebs. Apparently, the boy had experienced a growth spurt in which his body grew faster than his lungs, causing blebs – a sort of blister that forms on the lungs – to develop. One of these blebs ruptured, causing his lung to actually collapse, sending him to bed for weeks.

He was experiencing a severe case of something that many of us go through in a less concrete way as we try to make changes in our lives - growing pains. No matter how desperately we desire to proactively make changes, like losing weight or changing careers, or how much we crave to be more adaptable to our rapidly changing world or recover from our failures with more resilience, the fact is that sometimes – most times – change hurts. And often, change hurts enough that the most human, instinctive reaction is to stop what seems like the cause of the pain: our efforts at transformation.

Growing pains.
Maybe you’ve these pains in comments like this:
“We’ve tried that before – it’s never worked, and it won’t work now.”
“We’ve never done that before and I don’t know why we’re doing it now.”
“______ thinks they know everything. But he/she’s clueless about how we do things here. They know nothing about our culture.”



Growing pains.

We need a new pair of glasses when we come to the moments that we realize that we are in the midst of growing pains. God’s call for us is not going to change. God’s plan for wholeness and restoration is without end. What has to change is our heart. And in order to do that, we need to quit looking through the glasses of failures and judgement and victimhood. We must begin to see that our heart, our thoughts and our outlook on change are what is keeping us locked in growing pains.


Until we are able to take off the glasses of resentment and judgement and risk self-exposure and an honest examination of the motives of our heart, we will spend our lives afraid of growing pains and trapped in our head. So tonight, I wonder. Where do I need take off the glasses of victimhood, fear and negativity and see change as an opportunity to walk through growing pains to transformation?

Each time you put a pair of glasses one this week, take time think and be still. To look through new lenses at the changes that are happening around you. Put sunglasses in your car. Remember these decisions when your reasign glasses do on. in your car, write on them, put them in the place that you know you will see them when your thoughts start to take you down the road to fear and running from God.

And share it with someone. Talk to a friend, a counselor, me. Let them know how to pray for your heart, because the call of God on your life is not changing, so now its time to align your heart.