Sure, there are different stresses and difficulties that come having boxes packed, strips of tape riiiiping and echoing in the hallways of the house which will soon become your ex-house. And as you are looking at your new house on the internet, dreaming of all the memories that have yet been made, you almost feel guilty...
Honestly, the excitement of a new adventure someone cancels out the anxiousness of moving, but as I ponder what's happened in the last couple of weeks, I realized something profound (or at least deeper than normal)...
It's not the moving that's painful - it's the leaving.
Moving is part of life. Once movement stops, or even the presence of stagnation, I start to get slower, sedentary and maybe even a little obese in the way that I approach life. All things need to move - that's why God gave us legs.
But, the leaving part. Ugh.
Our last nights in Queensland for a while were spent with Christine's parents. Because we are citizens of countries on opposite sides of the planet, we have grown accustomed to living apart from parents, but that doesn't necessarily mean we like it.
I suppose the departure from parents is biblical - in Genesis we are told that we are to leave our parents and cleave (cling) to our spouses, but that departure process is like a riiiiiiping sound echoing in the collective married soul, and even though there is excitement in the moving, the leaving is difficult.
Abram's father, Terah, lived to a ripe old age of two hundred and five years. I don't know if you continue getting riper the older you get, but Terah must have been very mature. When Terah was well into his older years, he took his entire family, Abram and Sarai - yet childless - included. They left from their home in Ur to go to Canaan. In Genesis, we are not given the reason for Terah's departure; better land, adventure, new life, didn't get along with his 185 year old sister - who knows - but they settled in Haran until he died.
But his son, Abram, moved because of something different - a word, a promise (better yet) whispered on the wind to a childless septuagenarian and his barren wife, Sarai. Genesis 12:2,3
I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you, I will curse;
and all people on earth
will be blessed through you.
In contemporary society, most people would attempt to dissuade Abram from moving; they would tell him it was just his conscience speaking. That little voice you heard in your head - ignore it. There is no such thing as God; just a fairy tale, a false hope to get people through life. Just embrace the fact that ultimately we are all alone and we will all eventually sink into the great darkness.
How easy, and rational, it would have been for Abram to simply stay where he was in the land that his father had settled, meet up with the relatives after synagogue on Sundays, play a little Middle Eastern cricket on Saturday afternoons, live out his next one hundred years in relative stagnation and ignore that niggling whispered promise.
But the next words in the scripture, verse 4, So, Abram went, as the LORD had told him...
He was seventy-five years old.
Conditions aren't always perfect for moving.
But moving does not always mean transporting yourself to another country, or another town or even across the street. Moving can simply mean taking a step in another direction from where you thought you were supposed to go. For Abram, perhaps he had already envisioned a future, living out the remaining one hundred plus years of his life, childless, but still in love; and then at the point when you least expect it, that whispering promise on the wind.
Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you. Go from the place you were planted, an be re-planted in a different dream I have for you (so paraphrased.) And in the promise of God, that movement and leaving, painful as it is, will rejuvenate your life and bring new dreams and you will be blessed and be a blessing.
God bless you on your moving today!
