Something Needs To Change...1

This is the first of a new series, Gentle Reader. I have been asked to speak next week at church about change and how God has revealed himself to me in times of change. I see change as the norm and not the exception in life. And this is true, it seems, for a lot of people. We live in times of change, yes. But haven't we always? Maybe we're just more aware of change. Or more frightened by it. There are many kinds of change that impact us, from the personal to the ontological: change of residence or employment, change of marital status, the birth of children, change of diet, change of economic status, to name a few. These are changes that we often, but not always, have control over. Then there are the ontological, the changes that we have little or absolutely no control over: political change, change in the economy, war, climate change. Those are the constant changes that we have to live with, or die from. These are the changes that can leave us particularly vulnerable. In the final analysis there is really very little over which we have control. We do not choose to be born, and we don't pick our families. As children we live more or less at the behest and at the mercy of our parents. As adolescents we, hopefully, are acquiring gradually more autonomy and soon we are emerging young adults. The battles between teenagers and their parents for control over their lives are the stuff of legend. It is also a right of passage, and a very important one for entering full adulthood. No one comes out unscathed, but hopefully everyone comes out alive. There is one other thing we have no real control over. We are all going to die. Even those who manage to make it a few years past our best-before date. This is the big change that none of us ever becomes completely reconciled with. Even as we now have made doctor-assisted suicide (I refuse to use the politically-correct euphemism!) for persons who are already chronically and gravely ill, at least this can give us an illusion of control over the inevitable. The stock excuse, of course, is that no one wants to die without dignity, or attached to machines, unable to speak or feed themselves, and completely reliant upon professional strangers to bathe them and wipe their bums for them. It is not an attractive option, and physician-assisted suicide, or whatever you want to call it, can be a very convenient way of avoiding that kind of drawn out and pain-ridden humiliation. But is it really that simple? Could it also be that we simply don't want to lose control, even if it's an illusion of control. I have written elsewhere on these pages that people become atheists, not because they have no empirical evidence that God exists, but as a way of flipping the bird at the Almighty, as a way of assuming complete control over their lives and thus vindicating their primal urge to be their own little gods or deities. What would be a more eloquent way of sticking it to our Maker, than assuming ultimate control over our passing from this life into the next? Control is everything, especially with the Boomer generation and those following them, all marked with an incredible sense of entitlement. Why give God, who doesn't exist (well, they don't want him to), the last word? But God does get the last word. Even if we kill ourselves or pressgang someone to do it for us (thus making them murderers), God still gets the final word. We end up dying anyway, and after that we have to face him and the way we conducted our lives. And some of us are not necessarily going to like it.