‘Let the work of change begin,’ declared the new Prime Minister on the steps of No 10 on Wednesday. He used that word eight times in his short statement.

Everything must change. At least, that’s what Nina Simone once said in her song of the same name. ‘Nothing stays the same.’

 

Governments must prove they are bringing about change. Churches must change. People must change their jobs, their houses and their looks if they are to keep up with the pace of – what? Change?

 

It’s one of those words we must use carefully. We have built change into our culture, sometimes for the sake of it. The fashion industry relentlessly revamps and recycles its seasonal trends to create and feed a need. We ‘upgrade’ our mobile phones constantly, as if it were a sin not to. And we reach for the latest worship CD as if everything that had gone before were passé.

 

Christians have a duty to model change to a watching world, but only in the right way. Perhaps our personal touchstone should be that we should be ‘transformed into Christ’s likeness with ever-increasing glory’, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians. We are called to ‘put off’ our former ways of doing things and live a transformational life, which reflects the (albeit fragmented) arrival of a new world here amidst the old.

 

And yet, within the turmoil of perpetual change, some things do, mercifully, stay the same. As Simone sang, ‘Rain comes from the clouds, sun lights up the sky, hummingbirds fly…’

 

Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘In Time of “the Breaking of Nations”’, written during the First World War, reminds us that, amidst great upheaval, some things about us are positively timeless, too:

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War’s annals will cloud into night

Ere their story die.

The human heart is at the centre of our story: its brokenness causes misery, yet its capacity for love, expressed through simple, often mundane, acts of kindness, intimacy and commitment, endures and speaks of greater things.

Amidst political change, cultural change, even physical change, it’s worth asking ourselves how we orient our own transformation – and hopefully that of the world around us – to the absolutely unchanging nature of the God who is love.

 

Change for its own sake will always be ephemeral. A change of heart, on the other hand, can bring about change for good.