Our world seems to stay the same ol' way of change.

    Most of us see this as difficult because it often involves unwanted and unexpected things—illness, job transfers, financial downturns, marital complexities, children's accidents, job demands, difficult coworkers, our own aging… These problems make life stressful and change feared and unwanted. Add in the incredible rapid rate of technological advancement, and our changing world is overwhelming and intimidating.

    As believers, however, we have great advantages as we face these changes. With Christ to help us, we can face them with curiosity rather than fear! We can approach life as an adventure, becoming partners with the Lord in his work of transformation in our lives.

    You see, when we were baptized into Christ, we were filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). Ever since, the Spirit has been at work transforming us to be more like Jesus (2 Cor. 3:18). Through the Spirit, God uses the changes in our lives to draw us closer to him as we seek to understand them through prayer, Scripture, and the wise counsel of those who have faced similar challenges before us.

We can approach life as an adventure!

    Through change, God is at work in us to help us want to do his will (Philippians 2:12) and to work for our best good (Romans 8:28). We can approach change with confidence, knowing God will work his will in our lives through these changes, even if Satan has brought them to us to harm us. In faith, we can then approach these changes as adventures in faith, rather than merely submitting to them like victims of some cruel fate.

    Change will ultimately leads us to victory in Jesus. We will ultimately be like him (1 John 3:1-3) and triumph with him (Colossians 3:1-4). Jesus has the last word on the final and ultimate change in our lives, so we can rest secure that no matter how bad things might be, our last change will be our best one (see 1 Corinthians 15).

    We will all face difficult changes in our lives. We will have little control over many of them. But we do decide how we will react to them and how we will perceive them. We can offer every change to God to be redeemed into a tool to conform us to his will and bring us to his blessings. This kind of change is transformational and incarnationational—it changes us dramatically for the better and helps bring Jesus to life in our lives.

    As people of faith, we know our destination is glory and change is just another season in life’s great adventure on our way home. So the more things are the crazy hectic same, the more we can "stay the change!"