I’m getting married in three weeks.
In the moments of reflection I’ve been able to snatch amid the overwhelming busyness, I’ve been so excited. I can’t wait to marry Josh. But I’m also anxious about all the changes coming up. I feel like Dorothy watching the approaching cyclone that’s going to lift her up, carry her away, and deposit her in an unknown land.
I’ll move out of the house I’ve lived in for 12 years (longer than I’ve lived anywhere else). I’ll no longer get to see my sister and nieces every day. And the month after I get back from the honeymoon, one of my best friends is moving to another city. Instead of meeting up each fortnight to read the Bible, share life, and pray, we’ll exchange Facebook messages, do video calls, and try to squeeze in visits around our busy schedules.
This past autumn, I read Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow for the first time. Its lessons are comforting and strengthening me in this time of change.
Change Will Come
The book is narrated by the elderly Jayber, who is looking back on his life, including the 30 years he lived in Port William. In his mid-fifties, Jayber leaves the town and moves nearby to a small house by the river.
What enables Jayber to make a drastic change is that change was already happening to him against his will. Port William looked different every year as industrialisation closed in. His profession as a barber was changing with new government regulations. His friends and neighbours began to die, so fewer familiar faces surrounded him.
Jayber is able to let go because he knows nothing will stay the same anyway. If he dug in his heels and resisted every form of change, it would still come for him.
Even if I hadn’t chosen the path of marriage that will fundamentally alter my life and my place, things were never going to stay the same. Friends move away. Sisters enter new phases of life. Nieces grow up faster than you could have ever expected.
In a world where nothing stays the same for long, I have a great hope, an anchor amid the shifting waves: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). Our God never changes. Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever (Heb. 13:8). The Word of God will stand forever (Isa. 40:8). The truths most fundamental to my identity remain solid, even as circumstances shift.
“You Have Got to Live”
When Jayber moves to the riverside, he laments what he leaves behind. But he also takes up his new life. He reflects, “Troubled or not, grieved or not, you have got to live. And the facts of the case are even harder than that, for however troubled and grieved you may be, you will often find, looking back, that you were not living without enjoyment.”1
After decades in one house, his daily life in the new place would have seemed foreign, at least for a while. Like he was living someone else’s life. I worry I won’t be able to deal with that sort of change when I’m married. Yet Jayber settles in, and soon he’s able to say, “I came to belong to this place on the river just as I had come to belong to Port William.”2
It’s hard for me to imagine being anywhere else than this place, with the tree where familiar birds perch and the chalk drawings on the ground outside and the drain I have to watch carefully in heavy rain to make sure my house doesn’t flood. I belong here. With my limited imagination, I can’t see yet how I’ll belong anywhere else—but that feeling of being home will come in the new house, as surely as it did in all seven places I’ve lived.
Watch for Joy
Jayber teaches us that even when the present feels difficult, we’ll be able to look back on it and see the joy. But he also learned to watch for that joy in the moment: “I try not to let good things go by unnoticed.”3
That’s my goal for the next few weeks—somehow, amid the busyness of preparing and packing and moving, to stop and notice the extraordinary good that God has given me in this place. And then in the next.
Another book character has been helping me to anticipate joy. In the Anne of Green Gables series, Anne Shirley endures many life changes over the seven books. Though she grieves the passing of each season, she also looks with optimism to what’s ahead. She often references the idea of change being like a bend in the road of life:
“I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes—what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows—what new landscapes—what new beauties—what curves and hills and valleys further on.”4
“Perhaps college may be around the bend in the road, but I haven’t got to the bend yet and I don’t think much about it lest I might grow discontented.”5
“Oh, there’s another bend in the road at their end,” answered Anne lightly. “I’ve no idea what may be around it—I don’t want to have. It’s nicer not to know.”6
Come spring, when I reread this series, I’ll enter married life with Anne’s optimism about the bend in the road echoing in my heart. She and Jayber have both taught me that adjusting to a new season means receiving from God the new joys, instead of wishing I still had the old ones.
Jayber notes that after unpacking and setting up his house, the first thing he did in his new place was to plant a garden:
Making the garden completed my departure from Port William. At that season I had naturally regretted giving up my garden in town. I had mourned over it, remembering the way the fresh young plants had looked in the long rows behind the shop. They had been art and music to me. But now I planted another garden in another place in a different kind of ground, and expectation pulled my mind away.7
I pray and expect that married life will bring abundant joy and new reasons to praise the faithful God whose mercies are new every morning—and every season (Lam. 3:22 –23). He has given me another place and a different kind of ground. But if longing for my old life threatens to overwhelm me, I’ll think of Jayber and say to myself, “Plant another garden.”