The Stability of Your Times

“ and He [the LORD] will be the stability of your times.”

Isaiah 33:6a

My fingers drum on the shiny silver hide of my laptop. I stare at the wood floor of my bedroom and listen to the dripping water outside my window. So much, too much to try to capture all of it in the tiny bonds of words. Words. Black and white and angular. Tiny bars wrapping around concepts that laugh at the thought of being contained in such a puny prison. Like a giant watching a toddler wrap a thread around his wrists, so the thoughts I want to convey smile condescendingly on me as I attempt to tie them down with sentences and phrases.

Despite its condescension I set to, with furrowed brow and intent, fumbling fingers to secure the thoughts I’m having about the concept of transition. Some friends and I were talking about this gargantuan concept today. We’d all heard about culture stress and culture shock and the transience of the missionary community before we arrived overseas. However, the stories didn’t prepare us well for the massive upheavals we would face in our first term here. We pointed out that most missionaries not only face the changes of moving from their home country and culture to another country and culture but they also face many other transitions on a regular basis. When they arrive they may be told that they are needed more urgently for a different kind of work than what they thought they’d be doing, and their work and role could change multiple times in the few years they are abroad between furloughs. Their coworkers, neighbors and friends change on a regular basis; some to return in a matter of months, some never to return at all. Another challenge is housing. A missionary rarely moves overseas and then stays in the same house they came to in the first place. I have friends that have moved up to 13 times in two years (although, this is an extreme) but on average most single missionaries I have known here have lived in 3-7 places since they arrived less than three years ago. And then there are the transitions within yourself as you maneuver all of the uncertainty that goes along with all these transitions. It’s easy to find yourself, a once confident, flexible, easy-going person, becoming clingy, needy, and grasping with white knuckles some scrap of predictability and stability within your ever-shifting world. After moving twice within one month and having the majority of my friends either going on furlough or leaving Papua New Guinea for good to go home or to another country I definitely have been grappling with the trials of transition the last few months.

I’ve had to really grasp onto the truth of Isaiah 33:6a that says, “ and He [the LORD] will be the stability of your times.” No matter how unstable I feel, no matter how much everything around me feels like it’s shifting, lurching and spinning out of control, the Lord Jesus is the stability of my life. He neither shifts nor changes. He is ever steady, ever faithful and ever present. So, I’ll try to loose my fingers tightly gripped fingers from the things I hope will stay steady and predictable and wrap them instead around His steady hand.