It wasn’t all that long ago that she was leaping out of her crib, fearlessly scaling a chest of drawers and turning our lives inside out and upside down. Today, my youngest daughter graduates from college, cum laude, ready to take on the world.
The celebration of a milestone invokes nostalgic memories. And so, to mark this occasion, I’m dusting off a piece that Victoria inspired a long time ago (and in what seems now like a galaxy far, far away), when her mother was a freelance writer and columnist for a widely-respected – at least in our household – and now long-defunct, denominational magazine.
Change, Frightening Change first appeared as a Christmas meditation in the column, In the Word, in December 1990 issue of The American Baptist:
Victoria Lindsay Cruz-Griffith will soon be a year old. Unlike our first two children – who are much closer in age than we had ever anticipated – there is a three-year difference between Victoria and her older sister, Katherine. Three years is just long enough for parents to selectively forget some of the realities of parenting. With good reason! While you always remember how cuddly newborns are, how nice and fuzzy their heads feel, and how soft their skin, you tend to block out the memories of such things as 2 a.m. feedings, colic, diapers, spit-up, and feeling like a pack mule every time you venture out of the house. Babies have an uncanny way of altering their families’ lifestyles.
No wonder Gabriel scared the living daylights out of Mary with his strange message. Even under normal circumstances, a child would have meant change and upheaval in her life…To say that Mary was perplexed is probably an understatement. From the moment the angel Gabriel arrived at Mary’s doorstep, the predictability of her life was shattered once and for all.
That’s what happens when a baby comes into the world. Everything changes. It is also what happens at that moment when God in Christ enters our lives…
Change disrupts the comfort we find in the routines and patterns in life. It often means dealing with the unexpected and relinquishing some of the control we may have grown accustomed to. Change involves taking things as they come, without always having the ability to arrange them to our convenience or liking. Change often leads us on a course of troubling uncertainty.
But the certainty that God is with us allows us to look past our troubles to see the joyous upheaval that God has in store for us. Witness the certain faith of Mary, the peasant teenager who looked the angel square in the eye when all was said and done and announced, “Let it be.” Witness also the certain faith of her kinswoman, Elizabeth, whose own baby leaped for joy in her womb in the presence of the Messiah; or Joseph, who trusted a message delivered to him in a dream; or the shepherds who dropped everything to rush off to the manger; or the wise men who knew that a King even greater than themselves had come into the world; or all those – then and now – who believe in the outrageous promise that has already come true in Bethlehem’s child.
Victoria is at the age where she is discovering the world around her. That means most of the time she amuses herself by pulling things out of drawers and off shelves and otherwise rearranging what little order there is in our home.
Christ’s presence in us brings some reordering and reshuffling. Some things will be moved around, some tossed out and some turned topsy-turvy. But the you that emerges from his rearranging will be stronger, better, renewed and reborn.
May God always turn your world inside out and upside down.
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