{five-minute-friday}

A collaboration of writers. A collage of pieces focused on one weekly prompt. A five-minute challenge to write raw and exposed. Completely unedited. Magnificently honest.

This Week’s Prompt:  Same

I stare at the aspens, tall and white and proud yet so humble and beautiful. They are so different from home, where green reigns.

They’re just beginning to turn yellow. The barista yesterday, as he took my order he commented that it was beginning to feel like fall outside. I didn’t know. I told him that back home it is sweltering hot yet. So very different.

And in a new place it is so easy to be overcome by discontent. A longing for different. For change. For new. We get bored with the old. Yet the boring and the old and the mundane and the nostalgia hold their own type of beauty. Of necessity.

Even when we are longing for new—for that next step—we must cherish the old, and the now, because it still has so many things to teach us. And when our hearts long for different, we must keep tight grasp on the same. Because here or there, future and now, my family is the same. They are near and they are now and this is what I must hold on to.

Because no matter where we are on a map or a timeline, our love is the same. Jesus’ love for us is the same. And these unchanging things carry us from time to time and season to season with unchanging grace.

And so during times of change and uncertainty, we cling to same. We celebrate same. We rejoice in the unchanging and the foundations that hold us up during the changing.

When aspen leaves dance gently in the new crisp fall breeze, and they change ever so slowly yet rapidly before our eyes from luminous green to brilliant gold—this is the change we celebrate. Their leaves and their colors. Yet their tall, white core stretches still up to the heavens, competing with the mountains in the background. They remain the same. And as they do, we do. All the while changing.