When everything changes

Allison: Everything looks the same here. Nothing’s changed, don’t you think?

Bill: No, Ally, I don’t. It all looks different to me. I don’t hardly recognize it any more.

Stillwater, 2021

There are moments in life when it feels like the earth tilts, when something so radical happens that you forever look back and see a bright red X on the calendar marking that day.

November 22, 1963: My teachers are weeping because President Kennedy has been assassinated.

July 20, 1969: The world holds its breath as Neil Armstrong steps onto the surface of the moon.

July 15, 1980: I hold my newborn son and realize, with joy and fear, that I am now a father.

September 11, 2001 was such a moment. The United States was attacked, thousands were killed, an iconic part of the New York skyline was reduced to twisted steel and dust, and our certainty that we were too big, too smart, and too safe to be touched by our enemies crumbled like those towers.

We sometimes call such events “inflection points,” a term borrowed from mathematics. Picture a curving line on a graph that suddenly changes direction from negative to positive. That instant where the curve takes a new course is the inflection point. On a piece of graph paper, it suggests something interesting has happened. In the march of history, such a change can start a war.

Such moments are commonplace, but they often come out of the blue. A weird pain turns into a life-threatening diagnosis. A promising career is cut short by a decision to downsize. A carefree family vacation is bloodied by a drunk driver. A 2am phone call announces that a parent has died. At those moments, if we’re honest, we realize that we’re not in control of much of anything.

Our son’s birth was a joyful experience for my wife and me. Each following day was filled with awe and exhaustion, delight and a single-minded focus on the well-being of that vulnerable little boy. The life we had lived before was radically changed by parenthood.

And, wow, what a wonderful change it was! What a blessing to learn how to be parents, to learn how to devote ourselves to the needs of this laughing and crying, giving and demanding little human being who was flesh of our flesh. Having children changed us, made us better people, made us more humble, taught us how much we needed God’s help to meet the demands of family life — we were weak, well-intentioned but often unwise, and our sinfulness often prevented us from being the best parents we could be.

Lately, I’ve been feeling as though everything has changed. That son whom I loved is dead. I’ve grieved and have tried to live with that grief as best I could, but what I’ve been feeling lately is something beyond grief, or at least beyond any grief I’ve experienced before. It’s as though my house has tipped over and I can’t stand up straight. The inflection point has turned the curve negative and suddenly I feel as if I’m sliding down a slippery mountainside with nothing to stop me.

But that’s not entirely true. I would be lost if it weren’t for one unmoving North Star.

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” — Hebrews 13:8 (NLT)

My house may have tilted, but by God’s grace the sun still rises every morning over the mountains to the east. I am having trouble recognizing things that used to be familiar, but I recognize the one true God, my heavenly Father, and his merciful Son, Jesus, my Lord and Savior.

When Jesus was crucified, the hopes of his disciples were dashed. But when he rose from the dead, everything they thought they knew about their God was turned on its head. When Peter saw the Holy Spirit fall on Cornelius’ Gentile family (Acts 10), everything he thought he knew about his God got turned on its head. When Paul spoke to the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and abandoned his hatred of Jesus to become a messenger to the Gentiles (Acts 9), everything he thought he knew about his God was turned on its head.

God promised a son to aged Abraham and Sarah. God released Israel from enslavement to a hard-hearted Pharoah. God brought his Son, the Messiah, into the world through a poor, humble, God-fearing virgin. God adopts us into his family by faith in Jesus and calls us sons and daughter.

Inflection points. They have the power to push us into despair if we let them; they have the power to open our eyes to see the mighty and merciful works of God if we keep faith in his goodness and love.

Sometimes it feels like everything has changed. Much has changed, it’s true, but the most important things still remain. The foundation I have been standing on all these years, Jesus, the Rock of Salvation, is as solid and unmoving as ever. I’m holding on to that Rock.

Photo credit: Andrea Booher/FEMA Photo News