“Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” – Genesis 12:1
When I have looked at the heroes of the Bible, I have always read their stories in awe of the trust they had in God and what God was doing. It has always been easy to read stories like Abraham’s or Moses’ or Joseph’s forgetting that these people were human just like I am, and at the time they didn’t know the end of their story, just like I don’t know the end of mine.
The past couple of years have brought me through a myriad of experiences, good and bad. I’ve been put into situations where I’ve had to trust God with everything, and more times than not, I’ve chosen to doubt. Instead of battling the temptation to doubt God’s plan for my life with peace, patience and self-control, I’ve often found myself dealing with my doubt with anxiety, restlessness, and to an extent, idolatry.
In my shortsighted and self-dependent faith I had failed to grasp that God constantly uses a theme of displacement and a journey into the unknown . While in a culture where one’s identity and worth was heavily tied down to family and land, Abraham was asked at an older age to travel to a foreign land all for the sake of a promise he would just barely see the fruits of in his life. Even when Jesus calls His disciples, He doesn’t tell them exactly what they are in for, He doesn’t give them an itinerary or much information upfront, but rather He tells them to drop everything because they’ll all figure it out as they follow Him.
It’s humbling to realize that God doesn’t need me, but He wants me. He is the potter who forms me to be a vessel, but my function as a vessel isn’t as important as the fact that He wants me to be filled with Himself. In terms of trust, sometimes I feel like a teacup yelling towards the ocean, “Since I cannot contain you, I will not trust you.” But God is saying back, “I want you to grow so that you can contain more, so that you can trust more. I’ll do this by taking you to a land that I will show you…”
2014 is beginning with a lot of question marks for me. I’m not sure what God has in store, but I do believe that He desires relationship with us and that He desires revival. I’m not sure where God is taking me or where He is taking us, but He has made a habit of this in Scripture. My hope and prayer for the Pursuit is that we’ll figure it out as He guides us.