The Law of Life

Have you ever read anything that just spoke to you? Like after you read it, you were left feeling humbled and with clarity? Something that stirred emotion and was so relatable?

On Sunday night, I came across this story on Pinterest. I clicked on it, thinking I had read it before, as it sounded familiar. As I reread the beautiful story, I couldn't help but feel every emotion this mother felt. There was such conviction to everything she said.

She was expecting change and was welcome to it, genuinely excited! This was what she expected to be a change full of love, positivity, and prosperity. But it was oh so different.


What do we do when we anticipate change and are given more than we expected? Or when we are blindsided by such change?

"We make plans, God laughs."

We feel entitled. We want to believe that whatever fantasy we make up in our head is what will truly happen. I can admit, I too, do this. I have a journal with over 30 pages and 15,000 words describing my dream life. You can say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one;) Sometimes, it’s hard not to dream up those Utopian scenarios, but when it really comes down to it, life is perfectly full of flaws. In our day to day life, we do not expect something to go wrong... Until it does. Car accidents happen, disease happens, grades drop, relationships end, the only predictable thing is that life is unpredictable.
 
But is the surprise in change necessarily wrong or bad? No. Usually, it happens for better reasons. “When one door closes, another opens.” Cliche, yes. But true? Totally.
 

"Change is the law of life."

At one point or another, something or someone will happen that changes us. For me, it happened last year.
 
This is one of those things that I hate to talk about. I hate it so so so much. Because it makes me sad and mad, disappointed, and at times, aching for the past. But reading Kelle’s story made me think of it and I found it to be similar to a major change in my life.

I used to have a best friend. This is totally not to say I don’t have best friends now and they are the greatest, but this was a friendship unlike any other. She was more of a sister, or an extra limb. We met when we were three years old, in preschool, and were friends from the start. We thought we were sneaky when we ate our dessert before our sandwiches, she cried and refused to go to school when I was in Disney World, we drove around our matching pink Barbie Jeeps for hours, put on skits to persuade our parents for sleepovers, hazed each other’s siblings, got our phones on the same day, had sleepover weeks in the summer, walked into each others houses without knocking, ate pints of ice cream and watched bridal shows on Fridays, adored playing house and school, had a habit of falling asleep watching movies, sang Christmas carols year round, had specific drawers of clothes for each other at one another’s house...almost every childhood memory I have is with her.

And then one day, it all seemed to vanish. For a few weeks, things seemed wrong. We had had disagreements and fights before, but they were always resolved quickly. But this time, there was no exact event that sparked it. Things weren’t getting better. I felt rejected, and I had no idea what had gone wrong in our friendship. Things only went south. I prayed and prayed for things to get better, and put forth such effort to repair something that meant so much to my heart. But I guess what they say is true. All good things must end. It hurts me to say that nowadays, we don’t speak and our friendship is merely a nostalgic memory.

This was definitely the most difficult change in my life. I hate to sound like an over dramatic teenager, but anyone who knew us, knew we were absolute best friends.

It has taken me so much time to grow, develop, and find the good in this change. I lost a lot of trust in people. I went from always having that one person to do something with to having lots of friends to choose from, but it was never the same. Just her name being brought up would upset me. I could not comprehend how a close knit friendship I had for 12 years, suddenly vanished. The night of my 16th birthday, I was up until 3am, sobbing because I didn’t have my friend to celebrate what we had always planned to be the best birthday ever with (it still was the best birthday ever because I have the best friends, just not the childhood plan).

I changed as a person. I was more bitter. I felt betrayed. I could not see the glass half full since it felt completely empty to me. I just wanted to know what happened.



But now, I can live life and see that my friends now are some of the best people in the world. It effected a majority of them too, and although everyone was hurt in a similar, yet different way, it was a change that brought us closer, I like to think. The negative change can bring so many positives.

Kelle’s life was changed because her daughter was born with a disease that could not be cured and that impacted her life, her daughter’s life, and the rest of her family’s life. My life was changed over the loss of a friendship.

She struggled to accept that her daughter’s life could not be the perfect one she had wanted for her. I struggled to accept that my seemingly perfect friendship had shattered.

Now she adores her daughter and has found that everything in life doesn’t have to be just right to be perfect. Now I know that it really doesn’t matter who you’ve known the longest, but who will always be there. She found the positivity and light of a change, a new direction, God gave her because He knew she could handle it.

There is no change that we would go through that we couldn’t handle. Know that what seems like suffering is really just God saying, “I have much better plans for you!”

Read Kelle’s story. Maybe you will remember what changed you. Maybe you will see how the pits of life turn into peaks. But mostly, maybe you will see how change is not a negative but only an amazing gift that we are given to find the better life that someone greater than us has planned.

I thought this could tie in perfectly with Choose Happy week, considering when change occurs, the only thing you can do is find the good and happiness in it, even if it takes a while.

“When we say things like ‘people don't change’ it drives scientists crazy because change is literally the only constant in all of science. Energy. Matter. It's always changing, morphing, merging, growing, dying. It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting things be what they are. The way we cling to old memories instead of forming new ones. The way we insist on believing despite every scientific indication that anything in this lifetime is permanent. Change is constant. How we experience change that's up to us. It can feel like death or it can feel like a second chance at life. If we open our fingers, loosen our grips, go with it, it can feel like pure adrenaline. Like at any moment we can have another chance at life. Like at any moment, we can be born all over again.”
-Grey's Anatomy
 
xo
Hannah