Moving, Part 1

Three months ago, we left our church. We said goodbye to dear friends and left town with the clothes and other things we thought we’d need for an indefinite interim period. If it didn’t fit in the minivan, it didn’t make it.

I have hesitated to publish any of my thoughts publicly, but feel the need to do so, if only for a way to express what has been my family’s story the last few months.

Leaving our friends and this place that had become home to us over nine years of ministry was painful. We did not want to leave. Like so many others in Scripture—Abraham moving from Haran to Canaan, Joseph’s family leaving for Egypt, Israel wandering through the desert toward a promised home, Ruth trekking with Naomi—we heard God saying it was time to move.

Jamie and I prayed for months. Literally months of back and forth, questioning, wrestling, begging God for more time, until we surrendered to His leading. Yes, Lord. We will go.

I believe God gave us the faith we needed for that step. I certainly didn’t conjure it up.

The story of Abraham featured front and center in our devotional times, in sermons preached by my senior pastor, and in books I was reading. The man who fathered a nation, who obeyed without so much as a flinch when God said, “Go to the land I will show you.” This man’s faith paved the way for mine. When I didn’t want to submit to God, when I wanted to remain as Jacob, wrestling until God would bless me, He would place Abraham once again into the fore as if to say, “I will be with you, just as I was with him.”

I wrote my resignation letter just days before my birthday and handed it to my senior pastor and best friend on that day. What a birthday gift, right? Speaking things, putting them to paper, means they cannot be taken back. Handing Peter the letter was a line in the sand for me. It was a way of communicating even to myself that there was no turning back on God, no pretending to have faith, no thinking about it but doing nothing, no looking in the mirror and forgetting what I look like.

The faith God gave in those late days of March, He supplied all the greater in the months to come. Faith begets faith. Again, not that I somehow had more self-confidence and could more easily say Yes to God from within. But He provided peace and rest that I hadn’t had during the wrestling. It didn’t make telling our close friends and church family any easier. It didn’t make finding an “opportune” moment immediately following my daughter’s 8th birthday party any more fun. It didn’t stop us from wishing we could stay.

But the peace and rest were part of the confirmation. He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.

So we took that step of faith. The fog we felt during those months of wrestling lifted, but only for us to enter a new fog. We had characterized the first fog as one of uncertainty of whether to go. This second fog still hasn’t lifted. It is the fog of where and what. Where is this land God would show us? What is He trying to teach us in the meantime? What are these days of obscurity and cloistered wandering all about? And it is the fog of when. When will He take us by the hand and lead us? We do not want to be like Abraham so much that we resemble the description of him in Deuteronomy: My father is a wandering Aramean.