Entropy

The green dress was the final straw.

“Mum,” I yelled, attempting to pull the fabric away from my underarms so it stopped cutting into them. “Did you put this through a hot wash?”

“No, honey, you washed it yourself when you got back from camping.”

“But I only put it in at 40 degrees! How has it shrunk so much?”

“Maybe the iron?” she suggested.                                                          

I stormed off, put on a jumpsuit instead, came back into the living room and sat down with a huff.

“I’m just so sick of losing my favourite garments. My blue maxi skirt ripped in Ireland, my khaki shorts wore through in Girraween, my blue and yellow dress has a broken zipper, and now this one looks like it was made for an 8-year-old. And I have to replace all these things, and I loved them so much, and you know how much I hate shopping. Why can’t everything just stay in equilibrium?!”

It wasn’t really about the dress.

It was about the friend going through the break-up. It was about the friend whose dad is dying of cancer. It was about the friend who’s just moved away. It was about the friend whose family faced major upheaval last year. It was about all the friends who have gotten married in the past twelve months.

It was about my own dad’s illness, the end of my undergraduate degree, the uncertainty of the future.

It was about everything slipping out of equilibrium just when I got it exactly where I wanted it. It was about lovely things never lasting quite long enough.

I sat in prayer and thought about two of my favourite poems:

And about time, and chaos, and how cleaning the bathroom is pointless because the sink will be dusty again by Thursday.

Sometimes I desperately wish I could organize the universe according to my own personal schemas of what ought to go where. I resent entropy, that thermodynamic principle that disorder and randomness are inevitable; that order and predictability must always decline into chaos. I drag my feet when I see change and danger ahead in life, thinking that if I curled up in a tiny ball in the back corner of my closet, maybe I could avoid the suffering of the future completely.

But the fact is, I’m never going to be in control. I cannot tame and re-order the universe to align with my personal predilections. Whenever I try to, I end up becoming stubborn, anxious and perpetually dissatisfied with anything new entering my life.

Whenever I cling to an existing order, rather than surrendering to the inevitability of dynamism, I lose heart and hope. And I hate that. I hate how unwilling I am to let go of things, to embrace ‘just around the riverbend’.

It’s like being on a beautiful hike through lush forest and seeing a steep hill ahead. “I might just stay here,” you say, “It’s so beautiful – why would I want to move on?” What you never know till you get there, of course, is what the view from the top of that hill looks like.

And I get how silly that is. Each time I've said to God, “I like things exactly as they are, and I wish they’d stay this way forever,” I have been blind to the glory that lay just a few steps ahead of me. Retrospectively, I can see how silly it was to sit there, on a metaphorical tree stump, stubbornly saying NO to His coaxing, stubbornly refusing to go into unknown territory because I was scared.

But I am scared. I’m scared of the currents of the ocean and the vast, ever-moving cycle of decay and regrowth under rainforest canopies. I would prefer an organised and domesticated patch of lawn if only I could be assured that it would stay the same long enough for me to feel safe.

Everything in the universe says, “Come. Come into the future with me. Keep journeying.”

Even the patch of lawn keeps growing and growing and needing mowing. You cannot dam up floodwaters forever. The seasons keep changing. 

But despite our terror, the truth we actually need to hear is that His mercies are new every morning. Everything in the universe bids us come into the future, into redemption. 

The thing is, I'm not sure change is necessarily about entropy (physicists, feel free to correct me, but I'm trying to make a spiritual point here). As much as that lawn keeps yearning upward towards the sun, our lives are an upward trajectory of Grace.

Nothing is ever in equilibrium for long. Every day, our personal systems face new and slightly altered inputs. Even at times when we fear we’re stagnant, the thing we’re actually more afraid of is the call to live more deeply and fully in the present moment – seeing the nuanced and ever-new ways we can sail through waters we though we’d charted long ago.

The universe tends towards growth in the Holy Spirit. God makes all things work together for the good of those who love him – even the pain of letting go of something or someone we have loved.

Grace is never without suffering – when Peter and James and John came down the mountain from the Transfiguration, Jesus didn’t say to them, “It’s okay, you don’t need to stay on this mountain, because nothing is going to hurt you as you go forward from this place.” No, He led them to His Passion and Death before they glimpsed the Resurrection. 

They had to let go of Jesus as they knew Him to receive Him in His glorified state. 

Maybe nothing gold can stay. Maybe Goldengrove is unleaving, and Margaret with it. Maybe everything in our lives is constantly breaking free of the organizational models we try to create for it. But this is not something to fear.

Those weeks leading to Calvary weren’t simply chaos: they were the Holy Spirit unleashing potential in human hearts and reminding the disciples that even decay fertilizes new life. 

So I suppose I must admit (reluctantly) the shrinkage of my green dress will bring fruit in my life. Maybe that’s a new green dress looking less tired around the hemline. Maybe it’s a simpler wardrobe and a desire for fewer things. Maybe it’s simply a deeper understanding of the power of surrender and a recognition that I’m never, ever going to be in control.

And maybe that's God working for my good where I least expected Him to, saying "Come. Come into the future with me. Keep journeying."

Whatever your green dress is – whatever God is using in your life right now to bring about newness, a stripped-back heart, and Trust in Him – I hope that it doesn’t bring you fear or despondency. I pray that it’s simply the herald of the view yet to come; the reminder that there is a greater glory even than this; that God is good.

 AMDG