Is This Change Possible?
Mission Impossible?
Many people think change is not only impossible, but even undesirable.
- Wisdom is seen as learning to accept your internal circumstances and adapt to them - not to try to fundamentally change them. The leopard shouldn't try to change his spots. We arrive at maturity when we are able to resign ourselves to our own strengths and weaknesses.
- But it's not just that we should accept ourselves as we are. We should proudly express every impulse we feel. The call to deep personal change is therefore perceived as pressure to repress natural sexual desires, vocational ambitions, ethical preferences, or religious intuitions.
Others think change is desirable, but impossible.
- Many people are hard on themselves, desiring change, but seeing no way to accomplish it. They see only their own sin, imperfection, past moral failures, and ingrained sinful habits, all forbidding them from enjoying relationship with God.
- But they see no way to overcome these vices, which hold them tighter than a vise grip. And so they relinquish all hope of change, resigning themselves to a brand of moral despair that encrusts into indifference.
