Everything's changing. I don't recognise my own life.

When everything familiar goes at once, change stops feeling like change and starts feeling like loss. Solomon set birth and death in the same list — not as opposites, but as seasons each with their own hour. What is ending and what is beginning are often the same event, seen from different sides.

The conversation

The child: “Daddy God, everything's changing. I don't recognise my own life.”

God: “Change feels like loss. Sometimes an ending is a beginning you haven't recognised yet.”

The child: “What did Solomon write?”

God: “'To every thing there is a season.' Even the ones that feel like being torn up.”

God: “'A time to be born.' Birth is violent, painful, disorienting. But it isn't destruction.”

The child: “So this upheaval might be a birth?”

God: “Break down comes before build up. Weeping before laughing. The hard season sits right before the good one.”

God: “'He hath made every thing beautiful in his time.' His time, not yours.”

The child: “What if I'm not ready for what's next?”

God: “Nobody is ever ready for a birth. Readiness was never the requirement. The season is.”

The child: “So I should stop fighting the change?”

God: “Stop fighting it. Start trusting Me in it. I set the seasons. I time the births.”

The child: “Then I'll let this season do what it's for.”

God: “And it has your name on it.”

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." Ecclesiastes 3:11, KJV