Over the years I have heard many people make observations, tell jokes, or share their personal experiences of "going through the change of life." While I know that our bodies are created in such a way that we do go through various physical changes (yes, both men and women), and that those changes can have a great impact upon one's emotions, I am discovering that life can bring a whole series of changes at once that greatly impact both our physical and our emotional aspects of life.
In my life there are 5 specific changes that are in process that will all reach their apex by June of this year. Some of these bring great, positive blessing to my life. A couple of them are troubling at this point in time. Combined, they send my emotional stability into a roller coaster ride that requires a constant awareness that the God who created me is still in control rather than the roller coaster being in control.
A co-worker and good friend has been in either the hospital or a rehab facility since the end of January working hard to recover from a severe case of encephalitis. At the end of March, I will complete a preaching interim of a little over a year. In May our son and his wife will give birth to their second child and our fourth grandchild. In early June my wife will retire with 31 years of teaching in the public schools of Texas. Finally, in late June our daughter and her career military husband and their two children will leave for their next assignment in Belgium. And that doesn't even include that we had a new house built and just moved into it in January.
Now, I did not list those things for any readers to respond with either "poor thing" or "how exciting." The truth is that life is like that for most of us all the time. As a result, we experience stress, withdrawal, excitement, celebration, elation, depression, laughter, and tears. And yet, we make it through.
How do we make it through? We do it by love of family, encouragement and help of friends, words of information from a variety of sources, personal prayer, and an abiding faith in the same God who created us. To give each of these helps a good opportunity to function properly, I am going to take a few days of vacation to allow the physical side of life to catch up with the emotional side or maybe it is the other way around. Regardless, I want to be living in such a way that my body and my emotions are functioning properly, healthy and strong. I know what that takes for me. Do you know what it takes for you?
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