on change
last week, I packed up the last of my things and moved from the place I’ve lived the longest in New York, which is funny, considering that when I moved in, I only intended to stay for three months. now, everything is wrapped and boxed and put in storage for me to bop around New York and the world for a bit and I find my self thinking about how funny is is that spaces can hold so much more than just tangible things. that this apartment, this corner of the city, holds so much for me. moments when I couldn’t stop smiling, similar moments, but with tears instead. running in the crisp, Fall air through Central Park, biking the avenue in the dead of winter - alternating one of my hands in my pocket at all times to keep it from freezing off entirely. sweet, late-summer, rooftop dinners with tables made of palettes stretched out on the ground & decked out in lights & dried flowers & seasonal taco ingredients, surrounded by my favorite people. anxiety on my little gray rug, a full year of working from home in isolation, brilliant morning sunlight & the cutest sliver of the Ward’s Island Bridge that I could see from my window.
in that little fortress of a six-floor apartment, I experienced pain & joy more tangibly than I ever have. I watched the city regain life from those windows & wrestled with God about it in between those walls. I walked the fifteen block, two avenue journey home from my most frequently visited site down the street, & contemplated with every step. I made friends with the family bodega owners next door and with the men that sit on our stoop. I sat on my fire escape and watched First Avenue race below me while I cradled hot coffee in one hand and a book in the other, praying the metal beneath me was up to code.
making a home in New York is such a wild thing, it is so transitory here, people stay for seasons, coming & going with the weather. I’m no exception - this is my fourth apartment in five years. you find your grocery store, your nail place, you maybe know a neighbor or two, and then you do it all over again the following year - dotting the city with your short, but hopefully meaningful residency. each little corner I’ve lived in has carried memories, & tangible & intangible things, adding up to my life here in the concrete wonderland that is New York City. I forget most days that this is where people come for vacation, trying to see the best, most iconic parts of it all. but life here, day to day, isn’t all a highlight real. this isn’t the place I come to see a show or museum, it’s the place I go to the gym, the doctor, it’s where I get my hair cut.
as I leave this apartment, unable to deny any longer the feeling of change that has been aching in my bones for quite some time now, I’m thinking about how change often starts before anything moves. we sometimes get a whisper of it before it happens, and if you’re anything like me, you tend to ignore the Spirit & deny the inevitable. because change often times means that we have to put some old things down to carry some very new things. it often means that there is a pruning of what maybe stopped serving us long ago, people who began to hurt us more than help us - their own brokenness spilling out into other things, their decisions deceptive or unfair, circumstances that constrained rather than catalyzed. change isn’t just in the moment, it’s a journey, a series of steps.
sometimes it isn’t sudden, it happens so slowly that we almost miss it entirely, until we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror one day and realize just how different things look.
but it’s change that leads to transformation, and nothing transforms without changing. there is new to be done in us to carry the new that God has for us, and the more that we embrace this fact, the easier it gets to accept the change as it comes, to not try to fight it, but to see it as a gift that we would be invited into transformation to begin with. new wine really can’t be held in old, tattered, stretched out wineskins. and that stagnancy is really only a reality if we let it become one, instead of the grateful acceptance of the glorious growth that comes with saying yes to new, no matter what the cost.
