It’s been 4 weeks since we moved across the world AGAIN.
I cannot express the highs and lows, the joys and fear, the
raw reality of conflicting emotions when all your patterns and environments are
changes all at once. Plus carrying a baby, and having 3 kids 5 and under.
I can’t explain it, but I bet you can imagine.
I bet God
has also placed you at sometime in Transition. Transition for most people is
just a word, for people like me, it’s a curse word that symbolized all the
stress and tension of the gut-wrenching unknown and unfamiliar.
I bet God has called you into transition, like he has called
me.
I saw a very beautiful picture of this in the Life of
Abraham. (Genesis 12-26)
Did I say beautiful, I meant painful and terrifying.
When God first calls Abraham, he says,
“Depart from your
country and your relatives, and come into the land that I will show you”
Doesn’t this sound terrible? Like packing up you bags,
selling your house, loading up the kids and just driving. Maybe that’s sounds
fun to some of you, but in this season of my life it sounds like hell.
“God, could you just tell me where we are going so I could
look it up on google?”
Abraham took a while to obey too. Once he did obey, he lived
in tents for a long time.
A nomadic pilgrim.
Tents are a great visual for transition.
Could you imagine setting up your house every few days? I
can.
A very ambiguous future promise is all that looms in the
future, in the vague form of a promise…
A land, a seed, a
blessing.
Abraham struggles with this promise. In fact, given his
situation they seem nothing short of ridiculous. His faith is quite weak at the
beginning. He constantly tries to manipulate events in his own favor, to be
self-sufficient and provide for himself. It always goes bad, and God always
delivers him.
I also find it beautiful that He is commanded to set up
alters in pagan lands. Here we have this man, struggling each step of the way
to believe in God, pitching tent after tent, yet for good measure, he is also
asked to build alters of stone to consecrate the pagan ‘pit stop’ to his foreign
God.
I wonder if he mumbled to himself while he placed each stone
of the alter, “what the heck am I doing here?”
I am so grateful that God used someone who struggled with
faith so much throughout his life be the father of the nation, of the seed that
redeemed the World!
I am so glad Jesus takes out mustard seed faiths, our infinitesimal
acts of obedience, to burst forth his goodness and blessing.
I thank God for his promises.
29“Truly
I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or
brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the
gospel 30will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age:
homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with
persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. 31But
many who are first will be last, and the last first. -Mark 10
Happy tent dwelling my fellow transition-ers.
