I was asked to facilitate a workshop at the recent TEAR conference in Perth, and share a few things that I’ve learnt as my understanding of the gospel has developed over the past decade.  I’ve by no means completed the learning process, but I thought it might perhaps be helpful and encouraging to some of you if I share those thoughts here.  At very least, they’ll be an interesting marker for me to look back on in the years ahead as my understanding and life choices develop further.  But here’s the second of three that I’ll share over the next few months.

Another thing that I’m learning is that change is a very slow process, and that quite often it simply doesn’t happen.  We need to expect this and get comfortable with it.

I reckon that we have been hardwired to have a bias towards hope – and I think that’s a God-given gift.  But we often confuse hope with optimism – this idea, reinforced by every advertisement, that change is needed and possible and easy and quick, and that life should perpetually get better, and if it doesn’t, we’ve failed.  The truth, even before looking outside of myself, is that change takes a long time, and it’s a slow process that ebbs and flows and sometimes stagnates or even goes backwards.

15 years ago it would have been fair to describe me as a pretty hard-core conservative Christian with a very narrow view of the gospel.  I thought that refugees were terrorists and job-stealers.  I thought that drug addicts should be left to rot in prison.  I thought that single mothers deserved a difficult life, that the environment was a resource to be exploited for my personal pleasure, that my money and assets were, well, mine.  I thought that the poor were lazy, that welfare is evil.  Jesus was my ticket to heaven, and following him was primarily about getting my external, individual morals in order.

Well 15 years has turned me into someone who has very different views and a very different heart than my old self.  And if it took 15 years for me to become more empathetic, more involved with the vulnerable, more reciprocal in my relationship with the environment, more generous, less money-oriented, then I should give everyone else at least 15 years to change.  And that’s not at all being patient or generous, that’s just being fair – and given that everyone’s circumstances are unique, fair might mean that some folks need more than 15 years to change.  But again, I think we hear too many stories of incredible and/or rapid change while forgetting that Jesus’ life (from a purely narrative perspective – particularly in Matthew’s gospel) steadily got worse and ended up with him dead on a cross.

Change happens slowly, often not at all.  My role isn’t to change people or the world – that’s far beyond my control, and the only way to get that kind of change happening is to legislate, make new rules and police them hard.  That sort of change rarely lasts or gets beyond skin-deep.

I can, however, and must, make sure that I am perpetually open to change if I want others to be open to change. I must make sure that I am compassionate and empathetic when asking people to be more compassionate and empathetic. I must speak and act with love if I want people to be more loving. I must demonstrate generosity to the ungenerous if I want to encourage them to share more freely.

And I must be patient and hopeful as heck, because change takes a long time and often doesn’t happen – just as change takes a long time and often doesn’t happen in my own life.  In a world that measures the value of a thing by the amount of its measurable outputs, I believe the gospel offers a far more sustainable and realistic alternative: focus on following the Spirit’s meandering promptings, and let God sort out the rest.

I’ve been told he has a plan.