Last fall I wrote a post that was centered around the beauty of change. I shared pictures that showed ways God had been teaching me to see the beauty in the harshness of change.

This new year has brought so many changes to my life that I can’t even begin to describe. Changes that are mixtures of good, burdensome, and even sorrowful. Changes that leave you sitting there wondering if you are able to keep going or if life is just going to squash you like a bug.

Don’t look at me like you have never had those thoughts before. I know you have, because you’re a human just like me. And life happens to all of us.

While I was looking back on that specific post, I couldn’t believe those words had come out of my mouth only a few short months ago. When I wrote that, little did I know just how much change would be in store for me in the coming year. It’s easy for someone to say that change is beautiful when it’s not currently beating them over the head. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, November-of-2022-me.)

But upon re-reading it and looking at the pictures, I was reminded that life is wrapped in God’s amazing goodness, and that change can be beautiful. Not gonna lie—sometimes you just want to give in to the urge to wallow in the heaviness and defeat of life. Nothing ever goes the way we have planned, and it seems like life very seldom ever just falls into an even rhythm.

As I was reading in my Bible, I happened to stumble across a series of verses that summed up perfectly everything I was needing to hear in that moment.

“For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God. For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

2 Corinthians 4:15-18

In the verses preceding those, Paul was speaking about the many trials and afflictions that they were facing. And then he went in to the fact that all things are for our sakes. It reminds me of the verse that we all know in the book of Romans.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

Romans 8:28

What’s interesting to me though is that in Corinthians, it proceeds to tell us why all things are for our sakes.

“…that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God.”

When we face life and all of its annoying glitches and burdens, its trials and imperfections, God gives us grace for that specific time. He gives us exactly the grace we need for that moment of our lives. Enough grace to bear the burden. Much later on in 2 Corinthians it says, “And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee…”

When we face changes that we don’t like or that catch us off guard—trials that hit out of the clear blue—we have two choices: we can choose to let it defeat us, or we can choose to let Christ use it to breed thanksgiving within us so that the grace of God will bring glory to His name. I wonder how our walks with God would change if we chose the latter. Imagine what it would be like to stop focusing on the change and burdens, and start focusing on God’s amazing grace? To stop seeing the mountains we still have to climb and start seeing God’s strength that can move the mountains if He so chooses? To stop being intimidated by the future and start reminding the future about The One who controls it?

His grace is fully sufficient. The things of this life are only temporal. I don’t know about you, but I want to rejoice in the grace that makes life worth living.

Change isn’t all beauty, but if we allow Christ to turn our hearts to thanksgiving we will find the beauty within it.

What will your choice be? Will you accept defeat at the hands of discouraging trials? Or will you choose to let God turn your mourning into thanksgiving for the grace He gives us?