CHANGE

We have moved house.   We have been in our new home for one month.  I hope I don’t need to up sticks again.  It was exhausting.

I work from home, my husband does so at least one day a week.  We are organised people and when we cannot sit at our desks and work effectively we become headless chickens running in all directions unable to settle.

We work well together though.  In fact, we love projects and despite all the soul-searching, the agonising, the choosing, the steps of faith, the uncertainty, the sleeplessness, the tiredness, we have worked our way through mountains of boxes.  BT after a lengthy process came good and everything functions.   My head overcome with unimaginable detail and clutter has emptied.  I finally wrote the long-awaited article my publisher requested weeks ago and now I am attempting to return to social media. 

The new house is quite simply lovely.  It fits us like a glove.  Our furniture fits, and any excess is secure in my daughter’s garage. She returns from Africa with her husband in a few weeks to take up residence in the house they bought ‘egg-borrowing’ distance away!  It was a firm requirement of hers and a delightful request to fulfil.  Our son and his wife live perhaps two miles away. 

Family.   I still look at my family and wonder how it happened we should all live so close to each other; should love each other and choose to be together.  To me it is a wonder.

The family I grew up in didn’t function like that.  My parents divorced when I was twelve. My mother remarried soon after.  My father left, and we hardly saw him.  He eventually married and moved to Holland.  My sisters and I were people who lived at a physical and emotional distance from each other. It was the death of my father that brought us together and so we remain to this day.

We now have a delightful grandson and I looked around the table at the gathering for a BBQ on Bank holiday Monday in the beautiful, long-awaited sunshine and said to Judah, this is your family.   Love for one another in a family is everything. It includes love for those around us, neighbours, friends.  Love is something I had to learn and continue to learn.  Love is something to pursue. Love, embodied in a Person who showed us what it looked like, is precious beyond measure.

So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

 Love never dies.

1 Cor 13 The Message

When change comes to us, let’s be bold and grasp it with both hands.  The unexpected can be delightful and life-enhancing despite all the difficulties.   Anything can happen.