Leaving home
Part of the Lent experience is journeying. Considering where we are, what we are doing – and if that is where and what we should be.
1The LORD said to Abram:
Leave your country, your family, and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you. 2I will bless you and make your descendants into a great nation. You will become famous and be a blessing to others. 3I will bless anyone who blesses you, but I will put a curse on anyone who puts a curse on you. Everyone on earth will be blessed because of you. 4-5Abram was seventy-five years old when the LORD told him to leave the city of Haran. He obeyed and left with his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and all the possessions and slaves they had gotten while in Haran.
God calls Abram to leave his country, his family, all that was familiar, and go where he was showing him. He had to move on if he was going to become what God wanted him to be.
I absolutely hate moving house, it is totally traumatic. We once moved three times in 2 years, we just lived like snails, and only unpacked essentials! Abram is 75 – but he does what God asks of him.
Journeying is part of the Christian life, maybe not physically, but we are at times called to leave behind the familiar, step out in faith, and go where God calls. There may be some things we need to move on from. Habits that have taken us over, places where familiarity has bred contempt, things we no longer see because they are so familiar, or just new things to discover.
But journeying with God is not so much about where we are leaving from, but where we are going to. God called Abram from his familiarity, but he was also calling him to Canaan. To a new life, a new way – and wow, what things God had in store!
SO what is God calling you to put down, give up, move on from – not just for Lent, but for the next stage of your journey?
And what is God calling you to? What does he have in store for your life and mine?
Lord, our life with you is never static.
You call us to come with you.
Help us to hear your call
and to understand;
to know what to leave behind,
and to place our footsteps in yours.
May all our journeyings
be to the places you show us
that all may be blessed.
Pam's Perambulation 