I was the sixteen-year-old who gasped when my friend tattooed Winnie the Pooh to her pelvic bone. All I could picture was her eighty-year-old frame and a saggy, wrinkled bear waving a red balloon.

But now I’m a little different.

I like tattoos.

Was out the other night and saw a mesmerizing one from across the room. The lighting was dim, so at first I couldn’t make out more than a kaleidoscope of hues. But as I moved closer, the colors wrote themselves into, RUINED FOR LESS. I rarely remember Scripture references, so if it weren’t for this phrase being in the Acknowledgements of my first book, I would've missed it.

But I did.

In Isaiah 6, the prophet describes a radical experience of coming face to face with God. “Woe to me, for I am ruined,” he said, aghast that the majesties of God chose to intersect with him. And never again, he implies, may we be ruined by anything less.

This is not a tattoo coming-out party (but don’t put it past me), but a reflection on change, and changed reflections, and how me thinking different thoughts than I did in my driver’s license era is okay. I’m keen on tattoos now. I think they communicate a lot about an individual, and mark an individuality and permanence that are tough to come by these days. And I’m keen on God being gracious enough that our expressions of spirituality can be different today than they were yesterday.

My grandmother would roll over in her grave reading about tattoos being a means to expressing one’s relationships with God. And I suppose if we ever have grandchildren, we’ll say the same about their generations' modes of expression.

But that’s okay.

Because God’s okay with change and changed expressions.

Because He never changes.

Different generations say things differently and different seasons of our lives express themseleves differently. And instead of seeing this as a conflict, or conflicted identity, I wonder what it would look like to embrace constancies of change as crucial to becoming human?

I think a lot of what gets us stuck as Christians is thinking Christianity fits into a shape, or story. And though it has both shape and story, it is confined to neither, and unfulfilled by both.

God can handle our change and changing expressions. I guess the question is, can we?