“For the Lord is good; His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations.”
- Psalm 100:5
At any family gathering, a consistent source of fun is the photo album. Old pictures spark stories and even elicit tears, but the most common reaction they provoke is laughter—at the clothes you wore 15 years ago, at the hairstyles your mom’s bridesmaids had on her wedding day, at the way your grandparents’ house was decorated 60 years ago. The older the photos, the more struck you tend to be by how much has changed since then. Looking at some of these old pictures, it can seem like they were taken on a whole different world than the one you know today.
But when the people in those photographs start to tell their stories, you quickly realize that, for all the surface-level differences between 2015 and 1995 (or 1965 or 1925), much remains the same today. Whether wearing parachute pants or cargo shorts, parents still cram kids and luggage into vans so they can experience the wonder of the Grand Canyon together. Whether they put them in brown paper bags or insulated lunch boxes, moms still put post-it notes saying “I love you” on their kids’ sandwich bags. Whether the house was a log cabin built by your great-grandfather or a suburban condo that your realtor landed at a good price, it is still the love of family that makes a house a home. As much as the details change, the important parts of life endure for generations.
In the same way, much of the way God works in your life seems to change over time. When you’re a child, God is found in the exciting stories of the Bible, where He helps people like Moses and David and Samson win thrilling victories over impossible odds. As you get older, you learn that God wants you to know Him not just as a character in a bunch of stories, but as the one who loved you enough to send His Son for you. Faith becomes about more than memory verses and moves to a personal relationship between you and Christ. By the time you’ve reached adulthood and maturity (which don't necessarily happen simultaneously), your picture of God is a more complicated one—He is there in your victories and your defeats, when you laugh with joy and when you sob with grief.
Like the details in those old photographs, your mental picture of God and your understanding of His role in your life changes as the years go by. But the psalmist reminds us that while some things look different to you as you mature, the important things endure—“The Lord is good; His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness for all generations.” No matter how you change over time, no matter how mighty your triumphs or how miserable your losses, God’s goodness and faithfulness and love endure through it all, just as they have for the generations before you and the generations that will follow you.
Especially when goodness and mercy seem like distant memories, when you’ve fallen and feel like there is no one to help you up, you can draw encouragement from the promise of God’s unchanging love. As different as life looks when circumstances shift, God remains the same today as yesterday, still regarding you as His precious child. When God’s faithfulness seem like a memory from a long-gone past, resigned to faded photographs, take a second look—some things never change.
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