“Meg, I give you your faults.”

“My faults!” Meg cried.

“Your faults.”

“But I’m always trying to get rid of my faults!”

“Yes,” Mrs. Whatsit said. “However, I think you’ll find they’ll come in very handy…”
― Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Years ago, my husband and I both took a personality test. It ranks 34 core strengths in order of your answers, and from there can guide you into one of four overall domains. My top five strengths (which were empathy, intellection, developer, consistency, and input) truly described who I am, and didn’t overlap at all with my husband’s strengths. The funniest part was that his very top-assessed strength was dead last on my list. We laughed as we realized how that immediately explained so much about our marriage, who we are apart and together, and how it applied to so many aspects of our lives.

That strength? Adaptability.

I love not changing. I cling to tradition. Nostalgia owns my heart. My aversion to adaptability could be described and viewed as a fault. The unknown keeps me up at night, and big changes and shifts in life cause me deep distress that I try to manage with prayer, deep breaths, and M&Ms.

The fact that one of my faults was my husband’s top strength made us laugh and learn. We still refer to it today, years later, continuing to use that tidbit to explain misunderstandings and reactions as it holds true, even now with more miles on our marriage and minivan.

Those miles include depths of change and massive shifts in our lives, adjustments we asked for, and most that we didn’t. I wonder if I took that personality assessment now if adaptability would still score very last in my lineup. And even if it did, I would disagree confidently because I’ve grown tenfold in my ability to adapt.

Some of the growth has come from adapting to changes we asked for, hoped for, and worked for. Things like having kids. Buying a home. Letting our kids choose activities and hobbies that changed our calendar. Even changing up how we dress, eat, exercise, and make decisions. These are all changes that we grow from and mostly come from a pleasant place, which makes adapting less difficult.

Much of our growth, however, is the fruit of changes and choices I didn’t make. Job elimination. Being forced to leave a church. The consequences of others’ choices. The grocery bill from feeding growing children these days. Household appliances that break. Costs that skyrocket. Paychecks that diminish.

These are the changes that take the most work to adapt to, and yet these are the changes that produce the most fruit in our souls and lives. . . if we let them.

Change can indeed terrify me, but if I choose to mire myself to only what’s known and stay stuck and unchanging, boy, would I miss out on many silly and sacred parts of life.

For instance, sports. I am not a sports girl. I am a theater, music, speech team, library, and marching band kind of girl. But my husband is a stellar volleyball player and former coach, loves his Sunday night softball league, and lives to coach our kids’ baseball, football, and t-ball teams (yep, even the toddler is sporty). This was a massive shift for me, filling the calendar with sports practices, weekend tournaments, evening scrimmages, and early morning games. Not to mention driving to it all, shopping for it all, and planning for it all. If I’m honest, it’s not how I pictured myself as a parent. But baseball, track, football, gymnastics, and cheerleading have been part of my parenting life for over a decade, and though I still pout over the schedule and laundry (because good grief, the laundry – and WHO thought white baseball pants were a good idea??) from time to time, I’ve grown to love it.

I hate to think about the joy, silliness, pride, blessings, and growth I could’ve missed out on by stubbornly refusing to adapt to sports being part of our life. Sports gave me the gift of my faults.

There are other things too, other places and cracks where the sacred enters in and flourishes where I thought only dead soil resided.

After my husband lost his job on staff at the church we’d belonged to for twenty years, I thought our church life was over. We weren’t about to darken the door of a sanctuary again, at least not for a good long time. But our kids asked where they were going to attend Sunday school. And when your kids look at you through tears and ask where they’ll worship… you make it happen. So, we tiptoed into a new church building and community, with much trepidation and fear because we knew the cost. We knew what we’d lost. We knew what it would take to adapt to somewhere new, and it was more than we could offer.

With joy, I tell you that this new church has been a balm, and our whole family is thriving there. Again, I hate to think about what we could have missed out on if we’d refused to adapt to a change we didn’t ask for. The leaving of a worship community and the entering into another gave me the gift of my faults.

While adapting to the changes we don’t ask for can drag us right through the mud and into the valley, God the author remains unchanged. Malachi 3:6 (NIV) says straight up, “I the Lord do not change.” And His faithfulness, His consistency, His unchanging nature can soothe our fear of the unknown.

God stays the same so we don’t have to.

He takes our faults and turns them into gifts, offering them in love and creating beauty from ash. Where do you see Him doing this in your life?

 

Listen to Anna’s devotion below or wherever you stream podcasts.

 

 

 

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