It’s beginning to look less and less like me, and more and more like some facsimile of my memories. The furniture is there, but the ornamentation is different. There is the same amount of people there, but they have different faces and personalities. Walking down the hallway, I turn my head to the right expectantly awaiting a compilation of laughter and boisterous singing through an open door frame, but instead the door is closed. Everything is the similar and different at the same time.
It makes sense. This moment happens to everyone who is in transition, but I have never felt like there was a definite end until now. Today, while I was packing up the remaining articles in my college apartment, I couldn’t help but tear up at the enormity of the occasion. I had just finished four of the most defining years in my life, but they were in no way the end of my transitions.
For example: the next eleven months. A lot can happen in eleven months. An apartment can completely reinvent itself in less than a week; imagine what will happen to a person in eleven months!
Every time in my life I reach a transition, one song pops into my head: my second grade musical finale song. Here are the few lines I remember:
“ . . .The only thing that doesn’t change is change.
Well, isn’t that wonderful? Don’t you agree?
Everything changes from A to Z.
That’s the excitement, the ultimate test:
It all can be changed for the best!”
It’s a comfort. It’s a truth. This world is constantly turning and the universe is continuously expanding, and in order for things to improve, change has to happen. I know that the Lord has so much planned for me these next eleven months; things I cannot even comprehend, but the transition is always the hardest part.
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I wasn’t expecting this transition to be such a monumental event for me. But here I am, wallowing in my college apartment, holding on to the promises of God for these next eleven months.
