You Can Count on Change

by Neale Walsch
All conditions are temporary. Nothing stays the same. Which way a thing changes depends on you.

Many extraordinary thoughts were presented to me in Conversations with God, including some that I had never contemplated before. One of those new thoughts was the revelation that “God” and “Change” are the same thing.

I had never formulated things that way in my mind before. Yet now, with this new insight, I found myself enlarging my understanding of the nature of the entire experience I was having on this earth.

I used to hate change. Like most human beings, I couldn’t understand why things couldn’t stay just the way they are. Especially when they were nice. Why did all the nice things have to change? That’s what I wanted to know.

You work so hard to put things into place, to make some sense of it all. You struggle, you strive, you sacrifice. And then, just when you think you have it all put together the way you like it (or at least the best way you can GET it put together), everything starts falling apart. Nothing stays the same. Nothing remains in place the way you put it in place. Ugh.

So you start all over again. You’re back to square one. Like a toddler playing with building blocks, carefully placing one on top of another, only to have an older brother come along and deliberately knock them down, we become frustrated and angry. We start throwing the blocks around ourselves, because now we don’t care anymore. We don’t even want to try to set them up again. What’s the use? What’s the point? So, in an angry tantrum, we throw them against the wall.

That’s what I used to do. I’d get to a certain point, then I didn’t care anymore. I started throwing the building blocks of my life around. What did it matter? Life was going to knock them down anyway, right?

That’s what humanity is doing right now. Humanity is throwing its own building blocks around. Everything is coming toppling down. We’re not even taking the blocks off the top of pile and tossing them. We’re grabbing blocks from the middle of the stack, and sometimes from the bottom. We’re tugging at the very foundation of our human constructions.

Now many of those human constructions NEED reassembling. Many NEED to be pulled apart and rebuilt. But not this way. Not by utterly destroying what we hope to remake. That only makes the job of reconstruction harder.

So what we have to do is avoid temper tantrums. The human race can no longer afford them. We had such a temper tantrum on September 11, 2001. Without making a judgment about whether the anger that caused the tantrum was justified or unjustified, what we first have to understand is that such a tantrum only makes rebuilding harder.

You cannot get to where you want to go by destroying where you have been.

I have learned this in my own life, and I learned it most dramatically when I understood, at last, that Change is part of life. That, indeed, Change is Life Itself, manifesting. Change IS Life. Life IS Change. There is no difference between the two.

God IS Life. Life IS God. There is no difference between the two. This, too, I was told in CwG.

Therefore, God IS Change. Change IS God. There is no difference between the two.

CwG says that God is energy in motion. Everything in life moves. There is nothing that does not move, nothing that stands still. There is motion in everything. Motion IS everything. Pick up a rock and put it under a microscope. What do you see? Motion. Pick up ANYthing and you will see the same thing. All things move. There is nothing that does not move.

Motion is the nature of things.
Motion is another word for Change. If the thing moves, it is changing. It cannot stay the same and move. If it moves, it changes. And EVERYTHING MOVES ALL THE TIME. Therefore, change is occurring all the time in everything.

There is no question anymore as to whether things are changing. The only question is, HOW are they changing? How are they GOING to change? And, most important, is there a way we can CONTROL THAT?

The startling answer from God is, yes. WE CAN CONTROL HOW THINGS CHANGE.

That is because change is nothing more than energy, moving. And we can control how the energy of Life moves.

This is, in fact, how we create things. It is how God creates things. God creates things by affecting the way in which energy moves. We can do the same thing. We ARE doing the same thing, usually without even knowing it.

Every day we are affecting the energy around us, the energy of Life. We are doing it with our thoughts, words, and actions-what CwG calls the three Tools of Creation.

Thought is the first tool. What we think, we begin to create.
Word is the second tool. What we say, we begin to create.
Action is the third tool. What we do, we begin to create.
Use all three tools simultaneously and you have a very powerful combination, a very powerful tool.

All things change all the time. There is no way to stop that process. That is the Process of Life Itself.

Having this understanding has been helpful to me in more ways than one. I can tell you that it has been an enormous comfort to me when my in-the-moment circumstance has not been to my liking. Knowing that it was only a matter of time before things changed, I began to find the tolerance and the strength to endure the present situation or condition. I learned patience and gracefulness. I didn’t have to have things always go my way, every single moment. I found that I could even endure discomfort-physical or emotional pain-much better, knowing that all conditions are temporary and that nothing stays the same.

My mother had a way of putting this wisdom into four words, which she said to me often during the times of my youth in which I was not very happy with something or another in my life. “Neale,” she would say, “this, too, shall pass.”

Knowing that there was no question that change was coming, and that HOW things changed was something over which I could have control, I shifted my focus during times of discomfort from thinking about how unhappy I was to thinking about how I wanted things to look different. In what way, in what form, did I want the Change that was inevitable to appear?
When I finally understood that I could have at least some control over the changes in my life, I changed the way I dealt with change. I stopped trying to stop it. I began to welcome it, to see it as the most exciting part of my life. I began to embrace change as my OPPORTUNITY, rather than my BURDEN.

Since I now knew that change in my life was inevitable, I spent much more time working to CREATE change, rather than reacting TO it. I worked to create the kind of change I wanted to see in my life. I did this work using the three Tools of Creation.

Before I knew it, I was beginning to control the way my life was changing. Not in every case. Not 100% of the time, but enough of the time that the undertaking seemed more than worthwhile. Enough of the time that I began to see Change in a whole different way-as an effortless constant, rather than a constant effort.