Our Best Guess is Change by Anastasia Armendariz
As the conversation wound through life’s circles on Sunday, lyrics from Lucy Dacus’ song ‘Best Guess’ popped into my head: “I love your body, I love your mind. They will change. So will mine.” I first thought it was so unusual to hear this tenderness in a love song. Not only toward one’s present and anticipated future beloved, but also to one’s own ever-changing self.
More than being very wise and lovely lyrics, I started thinking about how Lucy Dacus mobilized the very grounded hope of these lyrics when she—on tour and even during a talk show performance—married couples to this song.
An artist facilitating the public union of diverse couples in the US despite all the precarity and injustice. Young individuals committing to a forever with someone else; backgrounded by the sung promise that they and their person will not long be as they were as they swayed together in their finest outfits. Even this week, between conversations with friends and social media trending posts, it seems many in the US are feeling a change. Feeling more optimistic about collective futures than at any other point in the last few years. Within this context, it was beautiful on Sunday to hear multiple stories affirming that changing dynamics of caretaking and receiving inherent to long-term relationships, as recounted by Bill and Chandon, can grow, rather than erode, love.
I also know not all care, or all change, is carried through by a fulfilled covenant of enduring, mutual, and full love. Change can feel more like a default contract we enter by merely breathing and being in this world. Thinking over the past few years of my life, I resonated very much with Brenna’s reflection that the journey of adulthood is often repeated realizations of, “oh! I can survive that?”
At the same time, as I fast approach the start of a new decade of my own life, I can feel a bit of the apprehension that Chandon and Brenna noted comes with ages that end in “0.” I also feel freer and generally more fulfilled in my life than I did when there were no white strands in my hair or I had never experienced a pop in my knees during Pilates. Phenomena that I was both frightened to first notice or even failed to consider would just become a part of my life.
We are in our individual, shaky or strong, but certainly shifting bodies and minds. And this is, also, each of us in the body of the whole church. We began this past week’s service with a prayer for the children and wound down with a reflection from one of our elders. Wherever we find ourselves along that spectrum and whatever else we might be feeling—for good or ill—in our individual lives, I’ll bring us back to a later line in ‘Best Guess.’
“Here is the church, here is the steeple, you were looking for saints, but you only found people.” How precious to be in a space where I can be, and find, “only” people. Not saints, not perfect people, nor ~fill in the blank with whatever other associations or expectations might spring to (or weigh on) our minds and hearts and spirits with those terms.~ However the many (and likely, often conflicting) ways we feel about life changes, know there are other “only” people right here alongside you who have felt, will feel, or are feeling their way through it, too.
Photo below is Lucy Dacus performs at the Greek Theatre in May 2025 on her 'Forever is a Feeling' tour.
