My friend Brenda lives at the top of a mountain near Boone, NC.  A visit to her beautifully renovated home can be a mix of sun, rain, heat, cold, even snow — all in the same day. She has a saying about the weather:

“If you don’t like it, wait a few minutes. It’ll change.”

Change is life’s constant.

When I came to Raleigh, nearly three decades ago, downtown was asleep, then-Fayetteville Street Mall populated mostly by pigeons. Lunch out meant one of three destinations: Poole’s Luncheonette, The Mecca or Hudson Belk’s Capital Room.

Traffic on I-40 was a trickle for a girl accustomed to a 45-minute commute through a maze of Atlanta cloverleafs. Big Texas builders hadn’t arrived to construct the Triangle’s now overbuilt townhouses, apartments and PUDS (that’s planned unit developments for the uninitiated). Nortel and IBM ruled the high tech roost.

What a difference a few years can make.

• Poole’s, originally morphed into the neuvo Vertigo Diner, then reincarnated as dinner-only Poole’s Diner.
• Belk left downtown, its renovated building now is home to Eyewitness News 11 along a re-opened Fayetteville Street.
• Nortel went bankrupt and auctioned off its assets.
• IBM, renowned for its “respect for the individual,” routinely dismisses domestic employees like a snake sheds skin.

You know the rest of the story:  building boom gone bust, I-40 traffic grown dense and dangerous, employees “resource action-ed”  out of jobs two, three times in the last five years.

Sure, the Triangle still has its titans of industry: SAS, Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline. But who knows what a day may bring? Even my friend Brenda is thinking of coming down from that picturesque mountain.

Are there any sure things in a world of flux?  God says:  “I am the Lord, I change not.” That’s a sure foundation on which to build a life.