Change is happening at work right now, and it has been happening since a few months ago. I’m no stranger to it – I’ve witnessed change happen several times in the course of my career, especially in my previous company, but I guess I wasn’t totally affected by it until my last career shift. Now we’re in the thick of it, and I have a completely different set of responsibilities to handle it now. I’m not directly affected, but I have this responsibility to help in making the change easier for everyone else.
It’s sort of funny, how all these changes at work sort of paralleled the changes happening in my personal life. They weren’t exactly life-shattering changes, but still, they were pretty major, and it shook my otherwise comfortable world. And I didn’t like that.
And it’s also a little funny that sometime a year ago, I was experiencing the same thing – except it was entirely different than it is now.
Let me be a bit cliche here for a minute: change really happens everyday. Our new CEO said that during the first time we met him: who you are at this minute is different from who you were five minutes ago. Sometimes we choose to change, and that makes us (painfully) aware about things, but often times, change is thrust towards us, and we have the choice to be agile and jump in, or be in denial until we have no choice to but to move.
I remember sort of going a bit meta a few weeks back when I sat down to look at all of what’s happening in my life. I remember smiling at how things seem to be unfolding, because really, it’s not so bad. But I’m a creature of comfort – so when I went back down to focus on what’s in front of me, I resisted, again.Â
I think what scares me – and everyone else, for sure – about changes happening is how it has the tendency to leave us uprooted. I felt like I was losing so many things that I have painstakingly built, everything and everyone that I had invested in because of these changes, and of course I didn’t want that. I deserve these things, I thought. These are mine. I felt – at least, as far as those personal changes were concerned – that I was floating up, up, and away, and I didn’t know where I will end up. I’ve got half the mind to just allow that to happen to me – to go with the flow, so to speak – and see where it will take me.
Except.
The last time I felt uprooted like this was almost two years ago, and it was terrifying in a lot of ways. Looking back at all that, I realized that while there was uprooting, I didn’t exactly float aimlessly. In fact, it was the opposite: I had simply changed direction and I was firmly in the middle of God’s plan.
I am not aimless. It felt like it was, because I didn’t know what was going to happen. But it was never aimless. It might not even be floating, actually. God has me firmly in His hands, and even in the midst of this changes, He has never let me out of His sight.
You know what? Maybe it’s not even really uprooting. I think that I am still rooted – deep in His love, as He had intended it to be. But I think that the changes that came in my life recently – both personal and professional – is some sort of pruning. It’s painful (because hello, you don’t prune without scissors and cutting something), but it’s necessary. Because if you don’t prune, then how will it grow?
I was never aimless.
True, sometimes things at work feel a bit shaky sometimes, and frankly sometimes I still don’t know what to do. But like what my manager tells me, I can take all these by the hands and make deliberate steps to push myself forward. And I believe God is telling me the same thing: after this moment of pruning, I have the ability to move forward and grow, trusting fully in Him who had stitched me together with His love. :)