You don’t have to be who you were.
Maybe it isn’t a matter of conquering struggle but simply growing forward in new ways. Sometimes these nuanced shifts are even harder to navigate because they aren’t born of pain or loss, which are easier to quantify. Perhaps God is seeding you with new vision, new ideas, different perspectives, or even enormous adjustments. It could be that you have changed your mind or changed your position. Maybe that thing you loved has run its course. Something doesn’t have to be bad to be over. That season has possibly given you everything it has to offer; it shaped and developed you, it stretched and inspired you. You’ve deeply incorporated its lasting values, and it has been true to you and of you. But now it’s time to move forward to something new, different, surprising, or risky. You might not necessarily be leaving one thing but running toward something else. G. K. Chesterton wrote: “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”2 Change means you’re alive, my friend.
Perhaps you are the one resisting change, imagining your best days are behind you. Maybe the narrative in your head sounds like: I used to be braver, I used to be thinner, I used to be needed, I used to love my career, I used to have a happy marriage, I used to love my body, my season, my life. The days ahead can never compare with the days behind. It could be that you didn’t ask for the change you face: you didn’t sign up for your husband’s affair, getting fired, a child’s illness, infertility, mental illness. Since you didn’t initiate or want this change, it feels like a deal breaker, a joy stealer, and you’re tempted to throw in the towel. Girl, no. Just NAH.
We can retain irreplaceable lessons and core values from every season. We are not entirely rebranded with each new season; we simply build the next layer. Throughout transitions, we embody permanent virtues and become deeply shaped, and as a testament to our design, we are capable of preserving the best of each season while rejecting the worst. The human heart is shockingly resilient.
By choice or by force, people grow and evolve, which can be incredibly healthy but not always met with approval. We usually like others, and sometimes even ourselves, to remain the same, treading the familiar paths, the ones we know, the ones we’re used to. Change makes us nervous in general. It is so tempting to interpret new as an indictment against the old, but that is an incomplete story.
Two thoughts: It is incredibly tempting to disparage people who didn’t “change” with us. I have criticized the words of others when the same words came out of my own mouth just two years earlier, which is incredibly un-self-aware. Human insecurity wants everyone right where we are, in the same head space at the same time. We want to progress (and digress) at a comparable rate: Everyone be into this thing I’m into! Except when I’m not. Then everyone be cool.
We need to get better at permission and grace. What is right for us may not be right for everyone, and we don’t have to burn down the house simply because we’ve moved our things out. Other good folks probably still live there, and until one minute ago, we did too. We can bless the honorable parts of that house and express sincere gratitude for what we learned under its roof. It is unwise and shortsighted to isolate the remaining inhabitants, because there is a lot of life left, and as it turns out, we are all still neighbors.
Second, it is also human nature to disparage people when they move into a new season. Whether shifting forward or “being left,” the impulse to discredit remains. I get it. We like our people to stay in the house.
My family worked steadily for six years to relocate collectively to Austin. Brandon and I moved here first, then one sister, then my parents, then the in-laws, then everyone else. Every last extended family member was finally in the same city, and we were living the dream. The family compound! We did it! So when my sister Lindsay announced she was quitting her office job and moving to NYC to go to culinary school, we all freaked out and heaped discouragement on her decision:
What?!
It’s too expensive!
You have nowhere to live!
It’s a concrete jungle!
Why would you leave Austin?
You already have a college degree!
Go to culinary school here!
After a few weeks of this opposition, she finally sat us down and explained how lonely and unsupported she felt and how our disapproval was crushing.
Record scratch.
The thing was, we really just wanted her to stay in our house. That was the root of our cynicism. It was a simple matter of feeling left behind. Without considering the impact of our criticism, our aim was to keep the house intact. But it is shortsighted to isolate people who move to a new house, because that neighbor thing is sturdier than we think. A healthy community includes a lot of homes. This move was right and good and healthy for my sister, and we ultimately sent her off with our blessings.
You do not have to be who you were, who you have been. If you have a dream brewing, I hope to throw light all over it. If you encounter a new idea or perspective, I hope you feel free enough to consider it. If you need to bury an old label, girl, here is a shovel. You can care about new things and new people and new beginnings, and until you are dead in the ground, you are not stuck. If you move with the blessing of your people, marvelous. But even if you don’t, this is your one life, and fear, approval, and self-preservation are terrible reasons to stay silent, stay put, stay sidelined.
You are not pigeonholed into a brand; that is not the way God works. He is on the move, which means, if we are paying attention, we are on the move with Him. It’s so exciting! Possibility and adventure and love and life await us all. These are the calling cards of the kingdom, and they are ours. There is literally nothing we cannot consider, no new season we cannot embrace.
We still retain the rights to every important thing we learned along the way; those layers count and make up the whole of who we are. We have important memories from every house—some painful, some instructive, some delightful, some necessary. But how thrilling to realize that even now God is designing a new blueprint, tailor-made, and His creativity extends to the very trajectory of our lives.
Onward, sisters.
There is no way to be a perfect mother, and a million ways to be a good one.1
— JILL CHURCHILL
CHAPTER 2
MOMS, WE’RE FINE
Except for a year or two in my parenting tenure, I’ve always been a working mom. Sometimes part time, sometimes from home, sometimes full time, but always working. With five kids, this means putting my head down and handling it while they are at school. Which also means I am not a weekly volunteer in their classrooms or the teacher workroom or any of that biz, because, as I have to remind my kids constantly, I have a job. This technicality never seems to connect with my spawn: