I hate change. I always have, ever since I can remember. When I was little, change meant pulling up stakes and moving to a new state every two or three years for my dad’s military career, leaving my home and friends and school behind. When I grew up, change was often equally unwelcome: the deaths of beloved relatives and friends, the loss of jobs, and all the annoying physical and mental symptoms that accompany the advent of middle age. In general, I don’t have a lot of pleasant associations with change.
Ellis is a pastor, and with that comes the perpetual duty of walking others through change—often the most painful kinds of change.
Which makes me the target audience for my friend Courtney Ellis’s new book, Weathering Change: Seeking Peace amid Life’s Tough Transitions. It’s reassuring to a person like me, opening a book like this, to know that the author is very much on the same page as I am (pardon the pun). “Change is hard,” she affirms right up front, “whether it’s unexpected change, unwanted change, or even positive change. It rocks my world, and I am a person who mostly prefers a rock-less one.”
But Ellis is a pastor, and with that comes not just a change-filled lifestyle for herself and her family, but also the perpetual duty of walking others through change—often the most painful kinds of change, including divorce, illness, and death. She’s had to get used to not getting used to things, which equips her to share hard-won wisdom on the subject.
Another strength she brings to this book is her deep love and knowledge of nature—constantly changing, forever fascinating nature. Her previous book, Looking Up, recounted how birding helped her through the loss of her beloved grandfather. In this new book also, she shows us how to find help to face the unexpected in both the natural and supernatural worlds.
We’re not just talking about flowers and butterflies here. Ellis has spent enough time exploring and studying nature to know its grittier side. So she knows that for animals and plants, change is often just as awkward and difficult as it is for us.
Ellis has a keen eye for the beauty and goodness that can emerge from the pain.
Some of this awkwardness can be unintentionally funny, at least for us human viewers. I had to laugh at Ellis’s description of molting northern cardinals (they “look like Darth Maul after he lost to Obi-Wan”), having witnessed the phenomenon in my own backyard many times. Then again, sometimes change can be flat-out gross—what happens to a caterpillar inside a chrysalis, it seems, is not for the weak of stomach.
And then sometimes it’s just painful for everyone. Ellis goes back to cardinals to demonstrate this point—like the dedicated birder she is, she draws many of her most memorable illustrations from the avian world. Talking with an ornithologist about bird banding, she learns that while some birds will accept being caught, held, and banded with good grace, cardinals “try to take their pound of flesh.”
“Change? Cardinals do not consent,” she concludes.
But Ellis has a keen eye for the beauty and goodness that can emerge from the pain. Her careful observations teach her, and us, to find peace during the hardest transitions. She reminds us of how birds listen to their inner urge to migrate, year after year, despite the incredible distances and the many risks. She shows how many of them move through the various stages of life, from the stress of learning to fly to the indignation of molting, if not with immediate acceptance—she watches one house finch fledgling protest mightily against the father encouraging her to go find her own food—at least with eventual submission.
We have the burden of having to choose to trust, in the face of fear and uncertainty.
But it’s Ellis’s image of a fallen and decomposing tree that lingers with me… for more than one reason. As I’m writing this, just such a tree is lying on the grass outside my house (though it will be chopped up and disposed of before it gets the chance to decompose). It crashed to the ground one windy afternoon earlier in the week, damaging our roof and heat pump and scaring the daylights out of everyone inside.
Change in my life has often felt like that—crashing in without warning, bringing chaos and destruction. But Ellis’s depiction of a fallen tree in the woods focuses helpfully on the life that flourishes anew in the wake of its catastrophe:
Fungi will take hold on a fallen tree, transversing a trunk with its weblike filaments, many too thin to be seen by the naked eye, each aiding in the delicate processes of decomposition. As they begin to break down the tree, microscopic bacteria also set to work, as do grubs and ants, termites, wood roaches and millipedes, their tapered legs walking delicately over the fragile paths of decay.
What we see on the forest floor is at once holy and macabre. The cycles of our ecosystems invite and allow the bodies of the dead—the once-mighty oak, the powerful bear, the soaring eagle—to nourish the living. Pieces that remain … will eventually become the soil below. And here we are, people and plants and animals, building our lives upon and above those who have gone before us.
It may feel as if the birds and the trees have an advantage over us when it comes to change. Ultimately, they have very little choice about whether to accept change—even if the cardinal wants to argue about it—while we carry the burdens of human consciousness and agency. We have the burden of having to choose to trust, in the face of fear and uncertainty.
But as our Lord who told us to study the lilies and the birds knew, we can begin to learn that trust from studying the ways of the natural world in which he placed us, and the way he brings creation out of destruction, life out of death. And as we learn, our burden may even become a blessing.
