Photo by Anna Hape

By Liz Chang

I try to make a trip across the country to visit my parents at least twice a year. My parents have lived in the same apartment since 1997. For the past several years, I’ve come to notice something about the apartment: something looks different each time I visit.

My dad likes to rearrange furniture, especially during the few days just before my arrival home for a visit. It is almost like the pieces of furniture are pieces of a 3D tetris puzzle in our living room, all set up and ready to surprise me as I walk in the door. I think this is where I get my “furniture fidgets.”

Friends who know me well know that I can hardly go longer than four months before rearranging my furniture; moving things around, adding something to a wall, taking something off of a shelf… and I enjoy every minute of the process. I enjoy the anticipation as I dream up a new arrangement in my mind. I enjoy the satisfaction of sweating to move a couch across the room. I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when all is set the way I imagined. I especially enjoy sitting with the thought that this could be the mark of a new season.

This time around, the new arrangement is in a new apartment. Truly, the mark of a new season. From living alone, to living with two close friends. From 2013, to 2014. And onward to a year of big transition, a.k.a. graduation in June!

New furniture arrangements and other bigger transitions require some amount of planning and dreaming before I can sit in the moment of the new season. At the same time, I try to remind myself that each phase of the process has something to be savored. It is often easy to give up when I start to sweat trying to get the couch across the room, but the mark of a new season is ahead! I must not quit on my vision that easy.

And in the midst of this reflection, I am reminded of Christ’s words of promise that he is preparing a place for me, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” (John 14:1-3)

What do you do to prepare for a new season?

Liz Chang is getting an MFT (Marriage and Family Therapy) degree at Seattle Pacific University. She graduated Taylor University with a BA in Psychology and Biblical Literature, and was raised in New York City.