day no. 15,289: change-o-ful

Ecclesiastes 1:9

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done

and there is nothing new under the sun.

As we often hear, "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Or in more modern verse, "Nothing is changing, so everything's changing."

There are two extreme reactions to change: phobia or philia.

CHANGE-O-PHOBIA

This understanding of change is that it is bad and to be avoided at any and all costs. Whatever is changing, is changing for the worse. Thus the strategy is to resist it and to hold on for dear life to whatever was before.

CHANGE-O-PHILIA

This understanding of change is that is good and to be embraced without question. Whatever is changing, is changing for the better. Thus the strategy is to accelerate change and increase the number of changes thereby increasing everything for the better as quickly as possible.

But both of these ignore the way that God made the world. There are principles in play, set into the DNA of things which cannot be changed. Some things are, in other words, what they are. These principles produce certain changes. These changes then require commitment in order to retain the principles that produced them. In retaining those inaugural principles, more change is produced, which again requires diligence to keep from abandoning the principles that got you here, etc...

Doing things the same, godly way will produce godly change. These changes will require godly commitment to the core values that produced the changes in order for those changes to be for the better and in order to keep change going forward by adhering to the first principles the entire time.

This is a position of CHANGE-O-FUL. This is embracing first principles and the changes they produce. This is delighting in God's set ways and the variety and abundance in produce these ways bring about. If we fear change, we will suppress the principles in order to maintain them, which does violence to the very principle we propose to protect. If we fall in love with change, we abandon the principles in order to see more change, which separates us from all first principles.

We go forward by remaining committed to where we were. We trust where we've been to propel us to where we'd like to go. We move ahead by looking back, but we must do both.