So what’s with the name? Why have I called this new set of posts “Still September?” In danger of stating the obvious, I’ll go ahead and say that September is anything but still for me. With schoolage children and a teacher for a husband, September picks up our summer routine (ahhh…summer) and throws it out the window (eeeekkkk….). The result is a month full of change, a catapulting of our lives into the new school year.

New friends and procedures and routines for my children, a new job for me, a whole new pace for everyone. Time to go back to the to-do lists and my frantically scribbled on desk blotter.

Quite simply, September is anything but still around here.

I think September is one of those months that feels a lot like January. It causes us to reflect on routines gone by, what worked and didn’t work. It marks the passing of time and makes us nostalgic. And it’s a great month to set up a bunch of expectations and resolutions.

I learned something difficult in the past couple of years. Call me naive, but I really did believe that someday life would settle down and that I would become a grown-up that had it all figured out. But that’s exactly what you learn when you become a grown-up: life never settles down. We’re constantly readjusting, reworking, reevaluating our lives. Life itself is change. It’s not just September.

Which is when I learned that it’s not about having it all figured out, but learning how to go with the flow. Control is absolutely positively undeniably an illusion (bleh, another grownup lesson). Although we claim we have it “under control,” we don’t. We have nothing under our control, really, except for our attitudes and our outlook on life.

With all of these grownup lessons in the back of mind, it leaves me longing for something to hold on to. With the consistency of change, I long for stillness. With the absence of control, I long for something to hold on to.

Enter GOD.

He’s simply the only constant: his love, his promises, his forgiveness, his grace. He’s simply the only one with control: all powerful, all knowing, all seeing.

I think acknowledging that things are always out of control and changing is our first step, because it drives us to the only ONE answer. So that’s what I’m seeking this September. The stillness of my God.