faith unfaded

I was working on my list of Morning Story songs. What started as a simple 30-day commitment — posting a song clip and corresponding verse daily to my Facebook profile pic — has turned into a well-oiled machine more than a year later.

I keep track of the songs and verses I’ve used, eventually building an alphabetized list where I mark the ones featured in my weekly Media Monday posts. New songs get added in bold, and each morning I select the verse to pair with the music. It’s an easy system for keeping up with unused tracks and future blog ideas.

But the alphabetizing system makes me cringe a little.

Current rules place songs like The Way and The Old Rugged Cross under T for THE, not W and O like we learned when I was in school — or even when I was teaching school.

It’s the same when I turn in articles for national publication. The Oxford comma (that faithful little comma after one, two, and three in a series) is now considered unnecessary in many style guides.

And I just want to scream… whyyyyy?!

I still have old-school red ink running through my veins, and it clocks these seismic shifts immediately.

Not because the changes are catastrophic.

Not because the sky is falling.

But because it’s uncomfortable when something you learned one way for decades is suddenly done a new way.

That’s when it hit me.

God does this too.

Not in confusion. Not in chaos. But in growth.

God sometimes stretches us past what feels familiar. Growth often feels like unnecessary change. And obedience sometimes requires relearning what we were sure we already knew.

It reminds me a little of Rachel’s conversation with her dad in the pilot episode of Friends.

“It’s like all of my life everyone has always told me, ‘You’re a shoe, you’re a shoe, you’re a shoe, you’re a shoe.’ And then today I just stopped and I said, ‘What if I don’t want to be a shoe? What if I want to be a purse?’”

Of course her dad didn’t get it, which led Rachel to exasperatingly explain:

“It’s a metaphor, Daddy!”

But our Heavenly Father understands.

We look at our lives one way for years, and then one day He gently turns our head and says, “Now look at it from this angle.”

And suddenly, everything shifts.

We don’t usually mind growth when it feels logical. We don’t mind stretching when it feels efficient. We don’t even mind change when we were the ones who suggested it.

But when God starts gently tugging at something we thought was settled — our pace, our priorities, our habits, our expectations — we find ourselves doing the spiritual version of squinting at a missing comma.

“Lord… are we sure about this?”

But maturity in Christ isn’t about knowing more rules.

It’s about staying teachable.

It’s about holding even our well-worn patterns loosely enough that when God says, “We’re doing this differently now,” we don’t dig in our heels just because the old way felt comfortable.

Because here’s the quiet truth:

Sometimes what feels like disruption… is actually refinement.

Sometimes what feels like unnecessary change… is actually the miracle we prayed for.

I’m learning that staying faithful sometimes means staying adaptable. And if God needs to rewrite a few lines in me to keep me growing…

Well.

I’m finally learning to leave a little margin for that.