Change has never been easy for me, and still isn’t.  When something big changes, I become a tumultuous emotional wreck, and react in extremes.  Recently, that means vacillating between “my life is meaningless and I’ll never do anything worthwhile” and “I’m going to drop everything and travel everywhere and move to the farthest away place I can and basically run away from everything that’s scaring me here.”

Anyways, this has deep spiritual ramifications, too.  Times of change always see my soul in turmoil.  And so it has been for the past few months.  For the longest time, I couldn’t explain it to anyone, or even to myself.  I didn’t understand what was happening inside me, what to call the complacent despondency or desperate longing for something I knew rationally I already had.  Day after day found me calling out to the Lord for direction, like a baby bird’s pitiful cheeping to its mother for food, and crying when I did not receive either an immediate answer or immediate clarity.

After months, I think I finally am beginning to understand.  It all relates to the one repeated line in every one of my prayers for the past two months:

Don’t leave me.

Somewhere, I know not where, the lie started whispering to my soul that God might abandon me, that He might give up on me.  Perhaps, after all these years, He’s finally realized I’m not worth the time and there’s nothing good in me to be redeemed.  Maybe He’s decided all His plans for my life were for my school years, and now that I’m graduated, He’s washed His hands of my future.

These lies crippled me, and even now that I understand what I was thinking and feeling, they still have a lot of power.

But some truths are starting to rear their heads, to fight for my soul when I am too weak to save myself.  These verses keep coming to mind:

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne?  Though she may forget, I will not forget you!  See, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands; your walls are ever before Me” (Isaiah 49:15-16).

[Jesus said,] “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

“What shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35-39).

“You are the God who sees me” —this one spoken by a rejected servant girl (Genesis 16:13).

God will not forget me, nor will He forget you.  He will not abandon either of us.  He is with us to the very end of the age.  We are engraved on the palms of His hands.  He who sees even the lowliest, rejected slave girls will surely see you and me, who He has called His children.  Nothing, no matter how big the change or how grievous the transgression, can take away His love for us.

You are not alone.  The eternal God, the God of the heavens, is with you, and will never forsake you.