Permission To Change Your mind & Get it Wrong

"When being right is at war with doing and being good, costing you your most loved relationships – always choose the good."

NOTE: FOR THE SAKE OF PRIVACY IN THIS ARTICLE, AND MY COMMITMENT TO ALWAYS TELL MY STORY, NOT OTHER PEOPLE’S - NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED OR INTENTIONALLY OMITTED.

Remember how we used to sign our yearbooks, “You’re the best – don’t ever change!” or a similar sentiment to that? For some reason, we thought it noble, and notable, in our teenage years that we were meant to stay the same and not grow.

I recently attended my twenty year high school reunion and I’ve got to say it was one of the more unexpectedly special nights I’ve had in a long long time. As we gathered for a night, reminisced, and shared countless updates with people we may or may not have interacted with during those crazy teenage years, I kept thinking, “I’m so glad they didn’t stay the same!” Sure, the essence of us stays the same, but we are meant to change. We are encouraged to grow and evolve. How boring, and sad, if we didn’t.

Actually, funny story about not changing. So I’m standing there at the reunion, glass of wine in hand, catching up with one of the girls I used to run pretty tightly with, and another one of our mutual friends. She was very much an IT girl in high school, and at the time of the reunion, had recently found a partner she was engaged to and they were looking at starting a forever life together. I was so happy for her, listening to all the exciting changes ahead for her, the new titles and roles she was about to take on as wife & stepmom, knowing that the people that we spend life with really are surely the most meaningful experiences we’ll go through in our lifetime. So she was sharing of her engagement and upcoming wedding details, I was sharing of our upcoming move from Seattle to the desert – all just really big life changes!

And our third friend that was chatting with us asked, “so in the last year, what was the most exciting thing that happened to you?”

He was being conversational, and I think genuinely curious.

My first response was, “selling our house and relocating our family to the desert – it feels exciting and scary all at the same time.” Seattle had always been home, so this was a huge land of the unknown.

My friend Katelyn* responded with, “getting engaged! (also note that her newly engaged & deeply in love glow was palpable). Cohen* stared at us and was like, “yeah but did you get to go to Mexico or anything cool like that?” And actually both Katelyn and I separately HAD gone to Mexico, but that didn’t even come close to ranking on the list of “most exciting or important things to report in a year” – especially when we’re talking family & life partnerships.

You’ll be surprised to hear that Cohen is still single but I thought, huh, maybe some people don’t ever change.

Change is part of our personal growth & evolution. I don’t want to be the same person in ten years, and I’m not the same person that I was 5 years ago. When we commit to growth though, we inadvertently grant ourselves permission to change our mind or get it wrong. Said another way, if we want to grow and evolve into a truer version of ourselves, we have to be okay changing our mind about some things, or admitting we got some things wrong in the past.

I came to faith in high school, at the ripe old age of 14. My love for Jesus was strong and I dove in to learning and understanding the guardrails around Christian culture right away. I Kissed Dating Goodbye, I didn’t drink until I was 21, I read my Bible & I worked hard to match my outsides with my insides. I wouldn’t have categorized myself as rigid in my belief system, but I was young, impressionable and sort of was good “towing the party line” on various ‘issues’ that ‘being a Christian’ stood for. What did that party line feed you as prereq’s to belong? In 1999, it meant Republican party, saving yourself until marriage, & supporting the traditional list of outward “sins” that were an unspoken expectation.

One of those traditions of the accepted ‘party line’ was gay marriage.