This morning I want to talk with you on the subject of “Transitions, a Time for Celebration.” If you have your Bible with you, you might turn to the book of Ecclesiastes and read along with me as I read from the New International Version.

The other day I was doing some writing and I had to do the translation myself in order to get the more accurate meaning that I desired, so I put a note in the margin: “MOT.” My son-in-law, who is an M.Div graduate from Bethel Seminary, asked, “What is this translation ‘MOT’ at the end of this of this writing?” I said, “Mike, that stands for ‘my own translation.’” And so, I’m not going to translate today—my Hebrew is not as good as my Greek.

Here we can read together from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. It says:

And then I love the verses that follow that, although I won’t be preaching on them this morning. But the scripture says:

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men…”

Let’s pray. Father we thank you for this wonderful service, your presence Lord by which we have been ministered to already today. And Father we ask you now that you would make your manifest presence known to us through the blessing of your Word to our hearts, and open our understanding to what you would have us receive from you through your spirit today, for it’s in Jesus’ name that we pray. And the people of God said, “Amen.”

There are changes that come into our lives. There are transitions that we experience. A story is told about a young boy who got a job in the mail room. About 2-3 weeks later they moved him out to the floor of the plant and put him on the line. He was there about another 2-3 weeks and they made him a foreman, and then in another month they moved him into the sales department. After about a month or so there, they made him Vice President of sales. Then one day the President called him into his office, sat him down and said, “Bill, you’ve only been with us for about six months. You came into the mail room, and then out to the manufacturing floor and became a foreman, and then moved on out to sales and became the Vice President of sales. I’ve called you in here today to tell you that recently I’ve been thinking about retiring. I want to tell you today that I’m going to make you President of this company.” The young man looked up at him and said, “Ah! Gee thanks, dad.”

Maybe some of us don’t go through those kinds of transitions because we don’t have a wealthy father who owns a successful business and who wants to make us President, but the truth is that transitions come to us and change comes to us throughout our lives.

I want to talk to you about that concept today because there is a difference between change and transition. William Bridges, in his book called Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes says that in every change in life there is a need and an opportunity for transition to take place. And as I said, many of us think of those two terms, change and transition, as being the same, but he points out that they are not. Change is the event and transition is the process that takes you through to the ending. That transition is a process of disenchantment, disidentification, disorientation and disengagement, and oftentimes change will come at different places in transition.

You may have been at a job for a long time and you begin to become disinterested in it; then you begin to disidentify with it, and then you begin to disengage yourself from it. All of us have known people who have worked at jobs, and some of us have done this ourselves, where we no longer had an interest in it. Pretty soon we found ourselves drawing back, and then pretty soon we weren’t doing the job we should be doing, and then we got fired. Or, we decided to look for another job, we found another job, then we resigned and the change took place and we went to a new beginning.
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Other times the change comes first. If you have a child that is unfortunately run over by a car and is killed or you lose a loved one to death unexpectedly, change takes place and then the process of disidentification, disengagement, begins taking event in our life and finally we move through that grieving period and transitions take place. We go on in life having passed through that. The experience of ending is as different as with as many people as there are because God allows our reactions to ending to be different; some are angry, some are happy, some are similar to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ five stages experienced by terminally ill people.

My son-in-law is a transplant surgeon at Mayo clinic and has observed death and dying many times. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, in her book entitled Death and Dying, defines the stages as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But listen, the point is that God is a God of order and He has provided any given number of ways for us to process endings in our lives, as varied as our personalities. The important point is to allow ourselves and others in transition to experience that, to go through it, to process it—God’s made a way. Here’s the good news—the good news that is in every season of life and ministry—when we experience ending, it is not final. Listen to me. But it is in fact necessary for a new season to begin. The beginning of new life—there are many examples of Biblical characters who illustrate change and transition in their lives, and we can note them—Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Joseph, Jonah, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Hezekiah, Esther, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the disciples and, of course, Paul himself. Our own life’s processes even appear to prepare us for decisions of change.

Someone has said there are four periods in our life, or four stages in our lives, that affect our mindset and our emotions and contribute to preparing us for change. For instance, the first stage, from ages 20 to 35: generally, we’re asking the question, “Who are we?” And then the second stage, ages 35 to 50: where we ask the question, “What is my work?” And then the third stage, ages 50 to 65: where we begin to ask ourselves, “What is my gift?” And then the fourth stage (I’m entering this stage now) and we ask the question, “What is my legacy?” We begin to see life with different questions, representing different values in our own existence. Christians should seek God’s direction in every stage of life, in every changing situation.
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Part II