God Is Change

What Octavia Butler taught me about exhaustion, faith, and flow

“All that you touch,
You Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.
God is Change.”
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

There’s a kind of exhaustion that lives in your marrow. The kind that comes from trying to hold everything together while the ground beneath you shifts again and again.

Lately, I’ve been returning to Octavia Butler. Her words have always felt prophetic, but lately they feel instructional. In Parable of the Talents, she gave us a world already on fire—politically, spiritually, ecologically. Her characters weren’t superheroes. They were survivors who learned to move with the breaking, not against it.

“God is Change.”
It isn’t metaphor. It’s a manual.

Butler’s Earthseed philosophy teaches that adaptation is the only way to survive, and I would add, the only way to flow. Everything else is uphill. Resistance disguised as righteousness. And there’s already enough resistance outside of us; we don’t need to add more from within. Adaptation is what happens when we stop fighting the truth of the moment. When we remember that ease is not avoidance. We can surrender. Flow. Feel all the feels. Let grief and joy, exhaustion and hope, take their turns.

Because everything we suppress, the body stores.
Everything we resist, persists.

Adaptation isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. It’s the moment we acknowledge the ego–its fear, its need for certainty—without succumbing to it. The ego wants control. It wants a clear plan. But what we actually need is faith. Not the ornamental kind, but the lived kind: the courage to meet the unknown without turning away. That’s what Earthseed was always teaching us. Change is inevitable, but transformation is a choice.

To adapt is to trust that nothing is wasted, not even the pauses. To understand that what looks like delay may actually be design. That what feels like stagnation may be sacred shaping. The exhaustion isn’t proof of failure; it’s a sign that the old way no longer fits.

And when we stop fighting change, we start shaping it. That’s the sacred act ~ the quiet, steady work of becoming who the next season requires us to be.

Change, after all, is not God’s absence. It’s one of God’s languages. 

The shifting, the unfolding, the pulling away. It all happens within a divine order we can’t always see. God is not uncertain. God is the constant inside uncertainty—the whisper behind the veil that reminds us: there is a there back there. Faith is what lets us keep walking even when the path isn’t clear.

God is Change.
Not chaos, but choreography.
Not punishment, but preparation.
And when we learn to flow with it—to trust it—we move closer to grace itself.