There is a quiet mercy in the ordinary days when nothing unexpected happens.
There are seasons in life when almost nothing seems to change.
Days follow one another so faithfully they begin to blur. Morning arrives, evening settles, and tomorrow looks much like today. Life moves along its tracks with a reassuring rhythm. Predictable. Familiar. Safe.
In those seasons, change is so subtle it can almost go unnoticed. If it weren’t for the children in our lives — learning new words, growing taller, outgrowing shoes — we might be forgiven for thinking that nothing ever really changes at all. That time is simply circling rather than moving forward.
And then there are other seasons.
Seasons when everything changes at once.
Not slowly. Not with warning. But so suddenly that we struggle to catch up. These are the moments that frighten me. I have known too many of them in my lifetime. Moments when life seems to be moving smoothly along its familiar tracks, and then one diagnosis. One car accident. One visit to the doctor that was meant to be routine. Or that one phone call arrives. Just one. And everything is different.
Small moments on the surface, yet heavy enough to reroute an entire life.
It’s never really about the phone, but the words that can change everything. The way ordinary objects become doorways into irreversible change. News you didn’t expect. Words you weren’t prepared to hear. A truth that cannot be put back once spoken. In an instant, the life you were living becomes unrecognisable.
Before the call, you were standing on solid ground.
After it, you’re searching for your footing.
Sudden change doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t wait for readiness or strength. It arrives unannounced without warning and demands immediate adjustment. There’s a particular kind of grief in that, mourning not only what has been lost, but also the life you believed you still had. For the assumptions you didn’t know you were making. For the future you had quietly been counting on.
What frightens me most is how quickly certainty can disappear. How fragile the sense of “normal” really is. One moment you are planning, dreaming, moving forward without thinking too hard about it. The next, you are standing still, trying to understand which parts of your life remain intact and which have quietly fallen away.
In seasons of rapid change, time behaves differently. Days rush, yet moments stretch unbearably long. You are constantly trying to catch up with new realities, new roles and new versions of yourself. There is no mirroring of yesterday. Each day brings something unfamiliar, and there is no rest in routine.
And yet, even here, life keeps moving.
I think that is the hardest truth of all. The world does not pause for our shock. The sun rises. People get up, go to work, eat dinner, and go to sleep. The sun sets just as it always has. Ordinary moments continue to exist alongside extraordinary upheaval. Somehow, we are asked to hold both the disruption and the ordinary at the same time.
Perhaps this is what life teaches us, over and over again: that stillness and acceleration belong to the same story. That long stretches of sameness are not a failure of living, but a kind of mercy. A breathing space. A time to gather strength for the moments when change comes rushing in, uninvited and unstoppable.
I don’t think I will ever stop being wary of sudden change. I carry the memory of those moments in my body. But I am learning, slowly, that even when the tracks shift beneath us, we do not disappear. God helps us to adapt. He is with us when we grieve. God helps us learn to stand again. And if it were not for the constant rock of God, who never changes and remains steadfast through it all, this life would indeed be frightening.
And in time, sometimes much later than we expect, life finds a new rhythm. It may be different from what we once knew, but through it all, we remain firmly held by God, our unchanging rock, even when everything else has shifted.
