I bought new pants last week.  This is not a common occurrence.

I am careful to keep my things in good order but pants, like everything else, are subject to the law of entropy. Pants wear out.

Even mine.

So, I bought new pants.

But as I always do, when I do buy new pants, I bought the same pants.

Occasionally, my partner, Susie, has wondered aloud whether I might perhaps want to try some different pants, but I’ve truly never seen the point.  I’ve been wearing the same pants for a long time.  They’re comfortable.

Of course, I’m not suggesting I literally never change my pants.

I am assiduous about the laundry.  I just don’t want different pants.

I am not, as you will have gathered, a man who willingly and readily embraces the new.

I like things as they are and I don’t like change.

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little afraid of change. A lot, actually.

This is a problem for those around me. It is (I am reliably informed) deeply aggravating to live with someone whose sole rationale for keeping an object in the house, for example, is that it has always been there. It is intensely annoying (it has been pointed out) to work with someone with a pathological resistance to doing things in new ways.

Now, Christians believe that God never changes, and that Jesus demonstrates that fundamentally consistent character: according to the Bible he is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Now, from that, it might be possible for me to construct a case to justify being precisely the kind of massive pain in the backside I clearly am – someone who refuses to countenance change, no matter what.

But that would be precisely to miss the point – because even if God never changes, everything else does.  It’s inevitable.

And I reckon that the value of God’s consistency, or anyone else’s, in the face of all that inevitable change, is that it makes them trustworthy. It makes them reliable. And that makes change less scary.

So, perhaps, instead of fighting change, I should invest a little trust in the people I love and live and work with and let myself be supported by their reliability.

And then, just possibly, perhaps, at a pinch, I can start to embrace change. Or even to change myself.

Although almost certainly not my pants.

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The header shows details from The Copse of Trees and Dead Horse, Sections 6 and 7 of Mark Bradford’s Pickett’s Charge, (2016-17), at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.