Constant Like the Sky

Lately my life has been a hurricane of events and emotions. I thought I was growing and changing - becoming more of the person I am destined to be. I thought this journey I’m on toward completion was one of only forward motions and advancement. I planned for times when my steps would be smaller or more feeble, surely, but I never calculated in the backward lunges: the times that I would fall down, give up, and turn around to run away. I never imagined I could make years worth of progress only to have it be backtracked and forgotten in mere months.

My life these days looks something like a roller coaster filled with highs of delight and success immediately followed by plummeting drops of despair and discouragement. I’m growing tired of the ups and downs - the sudden shifts of altitude and emotion. I’m feeling nauseous from the circles and loops I’m making on this continuous track. I’m ready to be headed on a straightaway. Ready to have a destination. Ready to quit turning back.

I’ve been desperately fighting and striving for something that’s solid and constant and unwavering. I’m weary of this life always changing. I want to be the best version of me I can be and maintain that through thick and thin. That’s how life goes, right? You grow up into who you should be and live the rest of your days confident in the self you’ve become. But I thought I would be there by now. I thought I would be complete, steady, and defined within the lines. But a day goes by, a month goes by, a year goes by, and eventually a lifetime will go by without accomplishing this.

So maybe the self is a process. We grow and shrink and run and fall. People will never reach completion, at least not on this side of eternity. Like the sky, we each have a shade that’s typical of us but far from permanent. The sky is most often blue, but daily, as the sun shifts, it brightens and fades and conforms to a whole slew of various colors. The sky can change within moments from cool magenta to burning orange to piercing black. That’s the way people are. Circumstances, locations, moods, and even other people affect our hue and saturation. Try as we may, we cannot be constant. We cannot stop the sun, nor life’s circumstances, in their course.  

As discouraging as it has been to realize that I will never reach a state of consistency, a pure humility and reckless dependence has been born out of my fluctuating self. For God is constant. On Christ the Solid Rock I stand. He does not change with the time of day or the shifting sun, but His colors remain true to His character forevermore. This is a constant I can base my life on. I may stumble and backtrack and feel that nothing I do is laid in stone, but one thing remains. And I need that one thing now more than I ever have before. 

Jehovah: the unchanging, eternal, self-existent God. My Constant.