Unchanged
For I the Lord do not change… – Malachi 3:6 (NRSV)
A good old friend who’d lived halfway across the country for many years suddenly moved close. For the decades we lived far apart, we’d had one of those friendships where we rarely saw one another, but when we did we picked up right where we had left off. Like no time had passed at all. I would have said this was a mark of the strength of our friendship.
Now that we were back in each other’s lives in a regular way, I realized that in our visits over the years, we’d been unthinkingly showing up as the people we’d been way back when, not the people we’d become.
We’d actually grown and changed a lot, as people will over decades. Now, seeing each other regularly forced our Rip Van Winkle relationship to wake up, and it woke up disoriented. If we were going to stay friends, we were going to need to show up as our current selves, not as a collection of old stories and reactivities. Sounds reasonable enough, but: what if the new usses weren’t compatible? What if we’d outgrown each other?
What if we didn’t like each other?
God doesn’t change, they say, but people do. You’re not the believer you were back when they taught you to say, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Nor who you were in Sunday school, or when you went on the youth retreat. You’ve grown and changed a lot. Has your relationship with God?
It took some hard conversations, a little doing, a lot of humility. But my old friend and I managed to build ourselves a renovated relationship. And, thank God, each got a new friend in the bargain.
Prayer
Whomever I’m becoming, God, let me show up as that person everywhere—even with you. Amen.

Quinn G. Caldwell is Chaplain of the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell University. His most recent book is a series of daily reflections for Advent and Christmas called All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas. Learn more about it and find him on Facebook at Quinn G. Caldwell.