Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Rev. Dr. Ruth Patterson has worked for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. In CAC’s journal ONEING, she characterizes our life’s journey as a return to a knowledge of God’s love and acceptance:
The mythical wisdom of the ancients reminds us of the sense of wonder at the beginning of time when all was innocence, nothing yet wounded. The garden was tended by the woman and the man. They lived in harmony with each other and with creation. And every day they walked with God in the cool of evening, the time of intimacy and communion. Adam and Eve had no idea what they would lose when they decided to do it their own way.
It’s the journey of each of us, isn’t it? I do believe that we come from God and are returning to God, but we need a softening of the heart in order to see again and find our way home. I know of no way for hearts to be softened other than by a combination of love and suffering. Somewhere along the way, because of life experience, we get cracked or broken. We often lose our way, but in the mystery of the grace and mercy of God, it is that very cracking that becomes our salvation, our way to discover again what we once “knew” but have “forgotten.” We become aware of an aching for Eden, a homesickness that knows that the only way back is through, by the way of dispossession, of no ecstasy, of ignorance. A bit like the treasure hidden in the field or the priceless pearl.…
This longing inevitably leads to an expulsion from the false Eden and a pilgrimage that goes by the way of dispossession. Such a journey is not for the faint-hearted but for those who, in the words of Leonard Cohen, are willing to forget their perfect offering. They begin to see that the cracks are gift. The wounds of the journey allow the light to shine through. The softening of the heart welcomes the diversity that its Creator proclaims is good. Out of uncertainty, not knowing, vulnerability, and openness, they become the mercy-givers, the peacemakers, the light-bearers. With them, there is always more….
The way back to Eden, the space between “paradise lost” and “paradise regained,” the place where we live our lives, can be one of great love and great suffering, of newfound humility and awe. It can also be a return to wonder … to the movement or the dance of belonging and becoming. It is the place where we laugh and cry and sing. It is the place where we risk taking off our shoes. It is the place of ever-increasing awareness. This is the way in which we “are not” and along which we, and even I, may dance with joy. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Amen.
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From Courtney Ellis, author of Weathering Change: Seeking Peace Amid Life’s Tough Transitions
Change is so hard. Yet it’s also inevitable.
There’s no avoiding it, ignoring it, or getting around it. Change comes for us all.
And strangely, although change is difficult and often painful, we sometimes find ourselves longing for it, even seeking it. It is one of the fascinating truths about being human. As Margaret Renkl writes in her beautiful book The Comfort of Crows, “I am learning that it is possible to want two contrary things at once. I want nothing to change. I want everything to change.”
When my husband Daryl and I drove away from our wedding reception 19 years ago, we both had tears in our eyes. Then I glanced at him and he glanced at me and we both erupted into laughter. We both realized in that moment that if only one of us was crying, the other may have viewed the tears as signs of regret.
Neither one of us had any doubt about our marriage. We’d been through the holy rigors of premarital counseling. We trusted that God had drawn and called us together. Our personalities and values meshed well and there were no cold feet.
Yet driving away from the people we loved most in the world (besides one another, of course) felt so final. In an instant, our primary relationships changed from daughter and son, sister and brother, longtime friends, to wife and husband.
As the January snow swirled and we drove away from the frosted forests of Wisconsin, we both sensed this seismic shift. There are few decisions as path-altering as getting married. Becoming yoked to Daryl would affect everysubsequent angle of my life.
Rare is the change that comes to us wrapped purely in joy or solely in heartbreak. Each one will bring us joy and sorrow.
And we live among people for whom this is also true. Our friends, our colleagues, our neighbors. The strangers we encounter are facing change. How might we love them well in the changes they face, even as we work to weather our own? It is so very hard to be a human.
One of the trickier aspects of change is that even good change arrives with a level of grief: the new job is amazing, but we miss our old coworkers; the new baby brings delight, but we would also love to sleep through the night; moving across the country provides better opportunities, but now we are far from the family we love.
Heck, I get grumpy when my iPhone updates because now I can’t find that thing that I used to be able to find.
In Weathering Change I write of four patterns we see over and over in the natural world when it comes to how creation copes with change. They are preparation, curiosity, adaptation, and resilience. Take just one migratory bird, for example:
The Arctic Tern travels farther than any species on earth, regularly doing figure-8s from the north of the globe to the south, following food and weather patterns. But before the bird takes off on these astonishingly lengthy flights, it prepares. The Terns feed on fish and krill and insects, fueling themselves for the journey ahead. They approach the weather currents and wind patterns with curiosity, for these will determine the trajectory of their flight. They adapt as conditions change. They are resilient in the face of storms or long stretches without food.
For a migrating bird, change is everywhere. They cope through preparation, curiosity, adaptation, and resilience, but they also cope by having their direction set. If it’s winter, they’re headed south. In summer, they go north. This is one of the chief ways we can weather change well.
And when we are able to walk faithfully through change—not perfectly or cheerfully or even with full acceptance, but faithfully, trusting that God is with us in the swirling wind—we are better equipped and freed to rejoice and mourn with others, too.
When we know which direction we’re going—the kind of people we want to be, for example, and the type of society we wish to inhabit—we can face all types of change with greater courage.
Life is a gift to be received with gratitude and a task to be pursued with courage, says the Presbyterian Confession of 1967. The same may be said of change.
In the Gospels, Jesus encounters near-constant obstacles: angry crowds, divisive religious leaders, confused disciples, hunger and thirst and tiredness. Yet he keeps banging the same drum, telling his followers, “I am going to Jerusalem.”
Christ’s earthly purpose is to take our sins upon him, to conquer death and rise again to new life. All the rest—teaching, preaching, healing—is not unimportant, but it is done in service of his singular goal.
We cannot solve the pain of change for anyone, but we can be present to them within it. I think of what Anne Lamott wrote back in Traveling Mercies, that the world is basically one big hospital waiting room where we who are “more or less okay for the moment” tend to the injured and the ill while waiting for the Healer to come. “We give them crackers and juice,” she writes.
I long for the day when all the loose ends of my life are neatly tied up. When the changes stop coming and I can finally rest. And yet I know it is in these frayed edges that the Holy Spirit loves to work. We worship the God of the margins, of the in-between times, of the journey.
Change is hard.
It will bring us to our knees.
And perhaps that is part of its goodness, too
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Discussion Questions
- Patterson describes a moment when the heart cracks open — not as disaster, but as the very thing that begins the journey home. Where in your own story have you recognized, looking back, that a wound or loss was actually an opening rather than just an ending?
- Ellis says we worship the God of the margins, of the in-between times, of the journey — and Patterson calls that space between paradise lost and paradise regained the place where we laugh, cry, sing, and risk taking off our shoes. What would it look like for you to be more fully present in your current in-between, rather than waiting to arrive somewhere?
