These days, sometimes it feels like I’m just exuding frustration from my every pore. While I am well aware that I’m not a paragon of acceptance when it comes to change, I’ve seen and experienced a great deal of resistance towards change over the past few weeks.

---

Change itself can create a surge of feelings ranging anywhere from excitement to fear (as I discussed in my post “Big Dreams“). Often, these feelings co-occur, or even meld. They can become so intertwined that it’s difficult to tell them apart, and we allow the negative feelings to overwhelm any possible positive feelings. After all, negativity can be an easy and extremely attractive default.

Let me be clear. Every single emotion you may feel in the face of change is valid. Sometimes it’s impossible not to feel. Sometimes it’s easier to shut those feelings off and pretend they don’t exist and that they aren’t the reason you’re so resistant to the change. Whatever the feelings and however deep you’ve buried them, those feelings are still there, they are valid, and valid emotions need to be felt. Not addressing those emotions, pretending that they’re not influencing decisions you make, becomes a dangerous game.

---

I have often found that when I’m finally able to accurately identify the source of my anxiety, or my anger, or my tears, those around me are often able to forge a more appropriate response. Until that point though, conversations are often useless. Arguing about how to correctly wash a fork is far less productive than talking about how stressed out I am that I’m not able to be at home. In the same way, expressing resistance to change because of the sadness and loss you feel when faced with leaving a place that holds memories of a wedding day filled with love or memories of cherished moments with someone you’re still grieving can produce a much different response than resisting because it’s been this way for years and there’s no need to change.

This kind of vulnerability is tough, not just because it means being open and honest with others, but because it also means being open and honest with yourself, and sometimes that can hurt. Not many people have learned vulnerability like this. In past years, I’ve realized that my anger is often code for a hurt that I’ve decided (consciously or subconsciously) not to deal with. What I’ve realized is that it’s easier to be angry than to be hurt.

---

In the face of change, vulnerability precedes productivity. Vulnerability means letting someone else help you through the change, and sometimes we don’t want that help. Sometimes it’s easier to just resist the change and pretend like we’re not hurting.

The problem is that this often produces a great deal more hurt than what we had to begin with.

Choosing vulnerability doesn’t necessarily mean choosing change, but it does mean recognizing and choosing to deal with the hurt.

Change happens, but you decide your response.

Big dreams are scary. Let’s start there.

I know big dreams are scary; I have a lot of them, and they’re ever-evolving. It’s not always easy. I’ve sacrificed time with my family, I’ve misplaced friendships I wish I had time to locate, dust off, and try again, and I’ve been lonely at times, often for these very reasons. I’ve asked myself time and time again different variations of “What on earth were you thinking?” and “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

I do it because I believe in something bigger than just me. I do it because I believe in an overwhelming passion to make a better world and because I can see this same passion in all its varying degrees within others around me.

---

 

Big dreams require change. That’s another whopper of a challenge.

My church has recently come upon a crossroads of sorts. To me, the choice is clear. I can see the big dreams forming, and I can’t help but be lured towards what I’m lucky enough to view as progress. The problem? Change is not easy. Change incites resistance.

I’ve encountered changes I fought tooth and nail until it was done. I remember leaking some fluid from my eyes as I cuddled my dog when I found out my previous church (truly, a church I considered home for many years) was being subsumed under the church I’ve now come to consider mine. I felt discouraged, afraid, sad, and angry. It’s a lot to feel all at once and even more to process emotionally. I didn’t feel excited, I didn’t feel adventurous, and I didn’t feel like it should’ve been happening. I felt comfortable and my little box was being turned upside down, forcing me to face reality. I had been away at school. Time was supposed to stop at home.

Not so. My big dreams for that little church were being laid to waste and I had no control over it.

So I resisted.

It was hard to start going to a bigger service with people whose names I didn’t know but who my mom and my sister began to recognize and talk to every week while I stood quietly by, smiling politely of course, simply trying to follow the conversation filled with names I didn’t know.

The church I navigate easily now, was not so easily navigated then. The gathering room and kitchen downstairs connects to a hallway (with a lot of rooms) that ends at a staircase that takes you to the greeters who usher you into the sanctuary, and the ramp at the front of the sanctuary takes you to the upstairs hallway with even more rooms which leads to a staircase which takes you back downstairs to the gathering room. Oh, and don’t forget all the doors to the outside or the staircase in the middle of the building that will put you out right in front of the sanctuary in the middle of a sermon. These things I can tell you now, I couldn’t have imagined being able to tell you then.

Instead of dying, my dreams got bigger.

---

 

Have you ever stood at the foot of a mountain or the base of skyscraper that you looked up at and just thought, “Whoa. Big”?

You likely felt mostly awe, but maybe you also felt a twinge of fear matched by a simultaneous surge of exhilaration, and you had two choices: stay put or move. It’s the fear that makes us want to stand still and just keep looking at it, admiring it, in awe of it; it’s the excitement that urges us forward.

But when both emotions come simultaneously, it can be hard to know what to do, how to feel…

It’s then that you make a choice.