When Change Leaves You Lost and Lonely

Did you ever have a beloved blankie as a child? Mine was a splotchy, magenta beauty I abused until it was in pieces. I cherished it. My mom did not. When I looked for it one day, my mother informed me it had been despairingly disposed of.

We all experience times of change when we feel confused, lost, and alone. It is easy to long for familiar, comforting things during these times. That job you left. The relationship that broke your heart. Your routines. Your culture. These losses can be devastating.

Yet sometimes we hold onto things until they are rags. The blanket that once offered warmth and comfort no longer served me properly, but I was too attached to recognize it. It took my mother’s love to change that.

While in your season of change, take heart in a few things that have helped me endure during mine.

1. You Do Not Know What’s Best for You

I am a list-maker. I like to check all my boxes, to be the do-it-all girl. In my expectation of certainty, I can begin to believe I know what’s best for myself.

Having these expectations sets us up for disappointment and difficulties with submission. Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you . . . that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give to you” (John 15:16).

We act like what He gives us didn’t belong to Him in the first place. If the Lord has taken something, it is because He has something better to give you.

2. Jesus Went Through Exactly the Same Thing

This isn’t a platitude; Jesus really did go through it. Can you imagine what it was like for Him? Jesus had never known imperfection or the burden of sin. Yet He came to experience tremendous loss. He loved the world so much that He “gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Jesus knows. He knows. You can hide yourself in His comfort, even in the waiting.

3. Knowing Loss is Knowing Jesus—and the Calling on Your Life

Paul famously said he counted “everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ . . .” (Philippians 3:8). Through this process, we become “like him in his death . . . [to] attain the resurrection” (Phil 3:10-11).

When we suffer, we know God. Knowing life requires death to self—and that life can be shared with others. There is always a calling amidst loss. A call to grow, a call to reach, a call to know.

When I stopped checking boxes and started counting blessings, I recognized the worth in my season of change. Hang in there, soldier of Christ— “the Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him” (Lamentations 3:25).