This week’s Five Minute Friday is late because of this post for National Suicide Prevention Week/Day. While you’re here, please read and spread some awareness for me? 

This week’s Five Minute Friday prompt is:

Same. 

GO.

I resist change. I am a same old kind of girl. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, y’know?

I like my routine. I like my plans. I like my way of life.

I get too comfortable with sameness, you see. I think I control it all, I have it all planned out- i’s dotted, t’s crossed.

My life is going to end up just how I want it to, dangit! (and I’m gonna marry Jimmy Fallon and have nightly lip-sync battles with him and Questlove. Spoiler alert: It ain’t happenin’).

Then Jesus disrupts everything. And He turns it all upside down. (for what feels like the millionth time).

I go through stages when my sameness is disrupted:

first I hate it,

then I realize  Jesus was right all along (as always)

then I get comfortable with the changes He’s made– and I’m back to being with my sameness.

And the cycle continues.

Just as life has shown me the past few weeks… girl doesn’t have it all figured out. And right when I think I do, life gets thrown a curveball that sends me straight back to square 1.

I can’t live in sameness when I’m called to different, called to newness. Even when that means all my carefully laid plans are thwarted (even for something greater-it still sucks).

Currently, I’m still firmly planted in the “i hate it” stage.

I hate this change (no, I don’t regret leaving student teaching- it’s just the sucky timing). Even though I know this is the right thing for right now, I don’t want it to be. I hate the unknown. I hate not knowing what I’m doing or who I’m going to be. It’s freaking terrifying (especially when this has been what I’ve wanted to do for a solid 90% of my life). Even though this is where I need to be right now, it is not where I want to be.

I want to have my life figured out again. (Exactly as I had planned, thank you very much). I don’t want my calling, my life goal to be different.

But alas, life didn’t exactly go that way this time. And I HATE IT. UGH.

~

Sarah Bessey posted the opening lines of her new book, Out of Sorts, yesterday and it grabbed me right where it urts.

Alternate book title: My life, The Jordan Taylor Story: when your best laid plans fall apart in front of your face.

~

As much as I loathe change, I know for growth and life to happen, change is necessary (a necessary evil, if you will).

Jesus didn’t call us to stay the same.

Anne Lammott reminds us that grace doesn’t leave us the same way it found us. (hallelujah for that). 

With Jesus in us and surrounding us, we will not be the same. Neither will our plans be (no matter how firmly we lay them).

We are meant to change. We are meant to keep evolving, keep being made new.

We can’t be the same as we were before Jesus. He made us for so much better than that. 

Even when the new scares me to death.

(longer than 5 minutes… I couldn’t stop when I got started, y’all. That’s a first for me!).