Managing Change

“Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara.” -Ruth 1:20

What do you do when a close friend or family member changes? You’ve known them to be a certain way all your life, or perhaps all of theirs, and then they transition in some critical way.

Around City Church we’ve seen lots of these changes take place and they range from the straightforward (a roommate goes back to school to change careers and it has a financial impact on the housing situation) to the subtle (over time one of the leaders you respect has slowly shifted how they pray and you’re not sure how you feel about it) to the dramatic (a family member transitions their gender).

One of the things we’ve seen this week in the first chapter of Ruth is that, while it must have been extremely difficult, Ruth managed to live in the tension of a lot of change around her. From what we can see in the text, she manage to stay closely connected to Naomi even as Naomi changes her name to reflect the bitterness she’s experiencing in her life (the name Naomi means ‘sweet’ and the name Mara means ‘bitter’).

By the end of the book there’s a shift again in Naomi’s name - back to the original. It seems like that transition may only have been possible because she had the Christlike support of Ruth who was willing to stick with her regardless of how she saw herself.

One tradition in our family (Bill’s family) is asking this question each New Years: How have you changed over the past year that the rest of us in the family may not have noticed but that you would like to have embraced? Are there ways you could try on a question like that with your friends/family members? Perhaps New Years isn’t the time to ask it - perhaps right now there are people around you who are shifting, and it may be hard for them to feel supported and accepted on their journey. Are you noticing them? And how about you - are you shifting? And are you inviting people to know you as who you are?

Talk with Jesus about these things today.