Change is Hard Work!

Hello world!  Have you missed me?  I feel like I should go to confession.  Bless me everyone for I have sinned.  Its been over a month since I last posted.  lol  My explanation is simple.  I have been extremely busy… moving.  Great fortune has befallen me to be able to move out of a noisy but pleasant apartment complex and to rent a house at considerable less cost.  So, these past many days I have been dealing with paperwork and such and then all the work to get the house ready.  And then to move all our belongings from one place to another.  There are complications and twists that I won’t bore you with but trust me — every minute of every day for the past month I have been busy, busy, busy… but thank God for family and for friends because I wouldn’t have made it at all.  But you know me — in the midst of all this business a new life lesson was learned.  No great revelation but an old one reaffirmed.  Change is hard.

As I packed and cleaned and painted and unpacked and sorted and resorted and then cleaned some more; I had the opportunity to do a lot of thinking.  I really want this change.  I loved my apartment.  It was on a third floor overlooking a grove of trees.  Once in my apartment I felt like I was safe from the world — in my tree house.  But it was three flights of stairs just to get to my front door, which wasn’t bad on a regular day but if I was packing anything…. yikes.  (Sad but true, I am more then a bit out of shape.)  And while my neighbor directly below was mostly quiet all around me was noise.  Once I opened my door in the morning to leave I heard the lives of everyone who lived in the building.  Especially the middle eastern family with multiple relations who communicated by shouting.  The toddlers were often crying and they TV was up full blast.  I couldn’t understand any of it but I often felt I was invading their privacy just walking by their closed door.  I could have been content living in this place for some time but this opportunity presented itself and who wouldn’t jump on moving from less then 900 square feet with no storage or garage to over 1100 square feet (with a full finished basement), a yard, screened in porch and garage.  So it was a no brainer.  I moved.  I changed.  I put my life in upheavel and am in the process of carving out a new life.  And it has been a lot of work.  True, in a week or so I will be able to finally relax.  The boxes of stuff all put away.  There will still be rooms to paint and projects to do but the urgency of getting them down NOW will no longer be present.  I will tackle what I can on given weekends and with friends and family in tow I will gently continue to form this house into my home, my solace, my retreat.  

Many years ago, when I was deeply enmeshed in the world of Youth Ministry exclusively I took a series of classes/workshops on dealing with youth at risk.  I remember one speaker talking about students coming out of rehab.  If their desire was to walk away from a world of drugs or alcohol they were challenged with the idea that they had to completely remake their lives when they got home.  They needed to find and develop new friendships, new hobbies, new places to hang out and new ways of being in their family.  Anything that they held on to their past was a potential bridge that would lead them back into their old and unwanted lifestyle.  Now I realize that my moving may be a stretch as I relate one to the other but I have been thinking about that talk and just about change in general.  

So many of us wish for change in our lives.  We want to loose weight or give up smoking… we want to be out of debt or out of a boring job… we want to be  a relationship or we are frustrated with the one we are in…  you name the change you want to see in your life.  But then what do 90% of us do?  Complain but do nothing.  We wish.  We wonder.  We may even read about how to do this or that.  But our main activity is to simply look across the fence and believe that it would be better if we were there than here.  And maybe we are right.  Then something happens.  We get sick or loose our job or the creditors start hounding us.  We change but only because we are forced to.  My opinion (and it is not a researched one) is that less than 1% of the population steps forward and truly seeks to embrace a wanted or necessary change.  Why?  Because it is such hard work.  And I am well aware that my moving into my new home is actually less work then my loosing the necessary extra weight I carry.

I have no secrets to success.  I just have empathy for anyone out there that is facing or in the midst of change in their lives.  I understand the hard work you are about.  I would rather spend my life cleaning nasty bathrooms than go through the emotional roller coaster of the past five years of my divorce.   Just know that at least one other person understand how difficult things are for you.  Hang in there.  Its all worth it in the end.  I remain, your servant in Christ.

Theresa