Currently Listening: The Soft Bulletin
By : The Flaming Lips

I guess this is what I meant, when I mentioned the beauty in pain. I read this awhile ago, and it's been an echo in my thinking ever since.

"The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from baby to child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons. " - Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

I feel the need to expound...but I think I'd just keep saying what I quoted already. I suppose I shouldn't really let that keep me from writing, but...but...I don't know. Change makes me feel sad and I am hurt when something I liked changes into something I don't like. I think it is upon this reflection that I am fearful to change myself. Change doesn't always go unnoticed, and someone is usually disappointed by it...and being the people pleaser that I am, that must never happen in the life that I lead. Riiiiiggggghhhht.

When I left home yesterday, my parents followed me to the gas station, where we changed the oil and and put air in the tires of my classy lady. I felt slightly frazzled as the last minute fixes were for sure taking me off the schedule I had set for the day. When all had been completed, I hugged my parents and drove away with Isaiah in the back seat. I realized I was actually not behind in my schedule at all as I looked at the digits on my dash. My fingers warmed on the chilled steering wheel, and I felt thankful...I felt thankful that my dad had showed me how to read the pressure gage on my tires, and that I had new oil in my car....love spilled over, and I was happy to have been inconvenienced. Because I took the time to realize that I hadn't been inconvenienced.

So the hurt, the pain, the stretch in such experience, is good, and beautiful. Because it's right to change. It is actually necessity. How lovely is the thought of such things. I never will move anywhere that has summer last eight months out of the year....nor to alaska where winter is really long...I will suck it up...and live in the extremes of four seasons, just so that I'll be reminded