Growth Means Embrace Change
-
October 5, 2024This is my first assignment outside the Philippines, my home country. I enjoyed and was comfortable with my previous assignment as Director of our College Seminary. I found fulfillment in assisting and guiding our seminarians as they go through a lot of changes and transitions in their life. I was explaining to them that it is normal to undergo such changes and transitions because these things would surely give way for growth. It was so easy for me to tell them until I had to experience it myself.
Change at times is hard and the transitions we have to undergo can really affect our whole being because this means leaving behind what is familiar and comfortable. Change and transition require us to step out from our comfort zones and embrace the uncertainty of the unknown. Leaving the place where I was comfortable and familiar was difficult, however, like what I would always tell our seminarians, change and transition open up possibilities for growth and opportunities for transformation.
If we go through the Scriptures, we could see various events where God’s people had to undergo changes and transitions for them to give way for growth and transformation in their relationship with God. And we notice that all throughout these changes and transitions, God has remained faithful to His people and in turn, they learned to trust Him more deeply. It is also through these changes and transitions God uses to transform them once again into His own image and likeness as St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans mentioned about being conformed to Christ (Romans 8:28-30). Jesus Himself, in our Second Reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, this weekend, shows us that He must go through a transition as well, “He ‘for a little while’ was made ‘lower than the angels, ’that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that He, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the leader to their salvation perfect through suffering.”
I had read somewhere from an anonymous author who said: “Your life is a story of transition. You are always leaving one chapter behind while moving on to the next.” My assignment here at St. Paul is another chapter of my life, another chapter of serving God through serving His people. But this is not just a sole chapter of mine to make, for we will altogether, as one community make this another chapter ours. As St. Paul says in his Letter to the Romans 8:28, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
