The beast of change

I just had an amazing time with my friend Alyson today. She has been the friend I have had for the longest and we still are close. We go back to about 3rd grade and went on family vacations together and had tons of fun growing up. We would even sit on the phone and watch a tv show on school nights together just so we could occasionally speak up and say, "I can't believe she said that!" I have so many fond memories with her.
She recently got engaged and she will be the first one of my best friends to get married. As she was sitting at my house and we discussed what people were doing now in Belton she received a phone call from her fiance Brent. I could halfway hear the conversation between the two of them and they sounded so cute together and then I got this realization that will sound like I am an idiot to you, but it seemed so divine at the moment. I realized that the man on the end of her phone was the person she was going to spend the rest of her life with. I know that sounds like I am just stating the obvious, but she is my first friend to get married and for the 15+ years I have been her friend she has been a single woman. I don't know if this seemed so crazy for my head to grasp because I don't know Brent that well or because it will seem so different for Alyson to now be Mrs. Nelson. I can't quite grasp it.

I can't begin to imagine what my friends felt like when I got married. Here I was still in college at the ripe age of 20 and my friends were thinking about what class they could make an easy A in and I was planning a wedding. It didn't seem odd to me at all at the time, but when I am on the other end of it with sweet Alyson getting married a normal way it still seems weird. I must have been like an alien or something to my friends.

Anyway, all that being said it reminds me that change is always going to happen. And usually change is going to feel so weird and sometimes uncomfortable that you might just decide to not even consider the change. We are people that love familiarity and want things to follow the routine that we have neatly packaged, but the best things in life are going to be when we embrace the change. Alyson is going to be the happiest she has ever been when she gets married and I will have my best friend to share stories with and to live life with as a fellow married woman. It will be amazing and it all had to happen with change. Some of the best things in my life have happened because I left everything familiar to me and followed a path that I had no idea of the outcome. It was then that I have grown closest to my Lord and that I have been truly excited to see what God had planned for me-I knew it was going to be good because I wasn't in control of it anymore.