This has been a tough season for many. Storms and sicknesses have assailed America, and old age leaves no survivors. We are transitory people in a transitory world. The philosophers say you can’t step in the same river twice because the water has changed. Even our earth, one standard of stability, is changing through earthquakes, volcanos and other natural phenomenon that reshapes the very planet we cling to. It would seem that all is in the process of getting lost through change.

The first law of thermodynamics indicates that no energy is gained or lost in a closed system. It just changes forms. The people who say this consider the universe a closed system. Does that mean that all things are getting lost, not lost, or just changed?

I think about those things when I consider the flow of history and the limited season of each person’s life. The constant change of all life might explain why human beings resist change and cling to anything that represents stability. Change is frightening because we find ourselves where we’ve never been, doing things we haven’t exactly done. Not-changing is repetition of what we’ve done in ways we’ve done it and seems to represent security (even though the river philosophers would deny true repetition as possible). Learning requires change. Mastery requires levels of repetition. All learning requires humility, which might easily be explained as knowing you don’t and can’t know it all.

I am curious about some constants that seem to live in human behavior. Values and purpose can be traced from the earliest of our knowledge of humanity. The undergirding behaviors that lie beneath the shifting cultures and philosophies seem to remain constant. Power, wealth, sex, and like values are easily seen in every culture, every race, at every historical time we know about in human history. How can those flimsy things, values, seem so constant when all else is in change?

I believe these are some of the ways we learn to see that God is real. We see that scientists are using all kinds of profoundly intricate and interweaving established processes to understand the world around them, which stands in the face of believing that all life is random. It is the soul, the deeper part of a person, the spiritual aspect of life, which seems to have an equally or greater stability.

The values we struggle with or against deny that we are just physical beings put together to inhabit a planet. There is an awareness of something completely beyond the limits of ourselves related to values and not just things. Everything has a purpose, things and values. We have physicality and spirituality. There is a book that explains this called the Bible. We are created. God is real. Jesus can be verified. In Him, nothing is lost, ever.