Of Mess and Moxie: Wrangling Delight Out of This Wild and Glorious Life

by Jen Hatmaker

new. You don’t have to be who you were. Maybe it isn’t a matter of conquering struggle but simply growing forward in new ways. Sometimes these nuanced shifts are even harder to navigate because they aren’t born of pain or loss, which are easier to quantify. Perhaps God is seeding you with new vision, new ideas, different perspectives, or even enormous adjustments. It could be that you have changed your mind or changed your position. Maybe that thing you loved has run its course. Something doesn’t have to be bad to be over. That season has possibly given you everything it has to offer; it shaped and developed you, it stretched and inspired you. You’ve deeply incorporated its lasting values, and it has been true to you and of you. But now it’s time to move forward to something new, different, surprising, or risky. You might not necessarily be leaving one thing but running toward something else. G. K. Chesterton wrote: “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”2 Change means you’re alive, my friend. Perhaps you are the one resisting change, imagining your best days are behind you. Maybe the narrative in your head sounds like: I used to be braver, I used to be thinner, I used to be needed, I