This again?

I need change in my life. I don't necessarily want my life to change, but I need to experience new things and not feel that I am in a rut. Admittedly, working with students provides me a great deal of this and sometimes I need relaxation, but I still love change. I think that it is a generational thing. I recently watched a video that described how rapidly our society is changing. We are flooded with information and something new comes along seemingly everyday. People refer to the rate of change that we experience as exponential, which for you who have erased all math knowledge, means things change at a pace that is hard to keep up with.

We live in a world that where we become complacent with things that did not even exist 15, 10, or 5 years ago. How can we live without cell phones? How did we connect before Facebook (MySpace does not count--it was terrible)? How did we know answers to meaningless questions before Google? We take these things for granted, and sometimes get bored with them. In its brief existence, Facebook has changed formats several times because we wanted it to be better or at least different.

It is not just technology that creates change. People my age will average 3 to 4 careers in different fields. On a less positive note, people also have a good chance of changing mates. Change is a part of our society, for better or worse. But what about those times when we cannot sense the change? What about times in our lives when all we pray for is change and yet we don't see it?

In Exodus we read the story of the Israelites journey through the wilderness in search of the Promised Land. While they are on their way, God provides a miraculous food source everyday so they do not starve. But, the people get tired of it and begin to grumble against God. They want some meat in their diet so God sends them quail, lots of quail.

Let's be honest, even when God has provided for us in miraculous ways whether that is financially, through relationships, or through other concrete ways, we get tired of what we have or of where we are in life. I am not saying that is wrong to want to make your life better or desire to have things like security or advancement, but if we spend all of our time thinking about what we do not have, we will easily begin to grumble against God for what we do have. Even if the grass is greener on the other side, it is still just grass, and what can you really do with grass?