Making a Change

Change. It has all kinds of meanings. Pocket change. Leaves change color. We change clothes, shoes, jobs, houses. Styles change. Hair-dos change. Seasons change. The weather certainly changes. A local health food store uses the tagline, “Change your diet, change you life.” Change is everywhere.

Change that is not money calls for us to adapt to something new. But what motivates us to change our lives?

For some people it is circumstances. We adapt to the situation or environment we find ourselves in, and so we change to make ourselves fit. And often circumstantial changes are not welcome, but necessary. This might be a job loss or a health change. Older adults can testify to the fact that as their bodies change with age, their activities may have to change. And though change is not always welcome, it may be necessary for safety or well-being. It could also be the loss of a loved one, which requires a change in every-day life or perhaps a change in residence.

A furniture salesman recently told me that he’d been at his job for 14 years, but before that he was a manager of an information technology department. My response was, “That’s quite a switch.” He said his department was out-sourced so he was forced to look for another job. “I wanted a job where I interacted with people more,” he said. But IT to sales is a big adjustment – especially in salary. IT was a salaried job, while sales is commission-based. But the man is happy he made the career change.

Some people would not risk making a career change, even if they don’t particularly like their current jobs. What if they make the change, and then find that they don’t really like it, after all? Or what about the money thing? Making a career change might mean a negative change in salary, or even a lack of salary for the time it takes to be retrained or educated for a new career.

My mother was recently hospitalized, and one of her nurses, Charlie, was a middle-aged gentleman who is a terrific nurse. He is strong, smart, articulate, kind and totally devoted to the care of his patients. Because the trend for males in nursing is fairly recent, I asked him how long he’d been a nurse. He answered, “About three years.”

Before he went to nursing school, he explained, he was a land excavator – he ran heavy equipment. “I helped build homes and communities all over this area,” he said. I was intrigued, so I asked, “What motivated you to become a nurse?” I was thinking it would be something to do with the slow down of the economy and in new building that occurred a few years ago. But that was not his reason.

He told me that he has been a volunteer firefighter for West Des Moines, and he had helped pull people from car crashes and other tragedies. As all firefighters are, he was trained to do CPR, but he explained that it is not really common for a firefighter to need to use that skill. However, in the first few weeks as a volunteer, he administered CPR five or six times to accident victims who may have died without the procedure.

Charlie related that others around him told him he needed to do something in the medical field, as he was “so good at it.” He said there were other events, too, that led him to know that he needed to quit his job and go to nursing school. He said, “God just kept telling me in not always subtle ways that I needed to make a change.” So he enrolled at Des Moines Area Community College in nursing. He said his income dropped by more than half when he was in school.

That’s quite a switch – excavation to nursing and a good salary to nearly poverty-level income. Charlie said he didn’t hate what he did before, but he didn’t love it either. Now he loves his job. And it shows in the way he treats his patients.

What if Charlie had not listened to the voice of God? What if his experiences doing CPR had been just that -- experiences, rather than life-changing motivation for him to make a change? Obviously, someone would have still cared for my mother and other patients on the medical-surgical floor where Charlie works. And no doubt the care would still have been satisfactory and healing. But I believe that God motivated Charlie to go to school to become a nurse because that is his calling in life – his reason. His mission.

So what is my calling? What’s yours? Do we need to make big changes to accomplish whatever it is that God wants us to do? Big change requires us to listen carefully to the voice of God, which may come to us through friends, co-workers or family, or it may come as a dream that you want to accomplish.

I am not suggesting that anyone is in the wrong job, but perhaps there are folks who would like to make a change in their lives. That change is not necessarily a job or career. It might be changing friendships, entertainment, reading material or how you spend your leisure times.

The point is, listen to your life. Listen to God. Pay attention to circumstances and events. Listen to what people say to you, what they notice about you. And then explore the options you have. Ask God for guidance. He will show you His path for you, and sometimes it means you have to make a change. Are you willing?