Podcast Short: Change - It Begins With Us

Change - It Begins With Us

Change.  It’s needed for sure…just look around.  But if our posture is to wait for someone else to create the change that we’re waiting for, we’re probably going to just keep right on waiting.

As a part of my own processing in trying to understand what change is, and how ‘real’ change is caused, I wrote this:

“Change. It's needed, but maybe not in the way that we think it's needed.  It seems that we need to be thoughtful about the values that we've embraced because of the ethics that we've discarded.  We need to challenge the apathy that we've fallen into because of the convictions that we've fallen out of.  Make no mistake about it, the collapse of the world around us began with the darkening of the souls within us.  Therefore, it's not about changing a nation that's in turmoil out there.  It's about changing a soul that's gone dark in here.”

Change begins with us.  With you and with me.  It begins here…right here.  The kind of change that we need…that we want, isn’t going to come from ‘out there.’  It’s going to come from everyday people like you and like me who decide to be different, to act different, to think different, and to live different.  It’s the impact of the single human being touching the lives of other single human beings in the process of living out our lives as human beings.  It’s how we celebrate with others when all is good, and how we lift them up when it’s not.  It’s determining that if we’re going to live out this life, we’re going to live it out so that when our days come to end, whatever’s left after we’re gone is better than whatever it was when we first showed up.  It’s about deciding to ‘be’ the person to other people that we want them to ‘be’ to us, and not waiting for them to ‘be’ that to us first.

It’s about asking if we’ve let our values slip.  If we’ve abandoned some ethics that we shouldn’t have abandoned.  If the principles by which we should be living have been lost because we got caught up in the flood of people, who themselves are lost.  It’s about asking if we’ve let our character be less than what it should be (or less than what we really want it to be).  If we’ve compromised standards, or become apathetic, or given the circumstances around us the power to make us jaded and negative and ultimately toxic to ourselves and to everyone around us.  It’s asking if we’ve let the deterioration of the culture define us, instead of us working to define the culture and turn back the deterioration.  Have we become what we hate and therefore we hate what we’ve become, so we’re stuck in what we’ve become (but not what we are).

And in all of that, it’s recognizing that we don’t need to be any of that, or do any of that.  We can be different.  We can set ourselves apart from a culture that’s tearing itself apart.  We can be an agent of change.  It is within us to do that.  And in choosing to be different in order to bring change, we cause those around us to be different as well, which can change everything.

Change.  It’s needed for sure.  But let’s quit waiting on someone else to do it.