The season of Advent is always a meaningful season of reflection and pondering for me. This year, join me in this journey of pondering, preparing and anticipating the new way God is breaking into creation.
God’s call does not necessarily ask us to move our physical surroundings (although sometimes it does); most often it asks us to move our internal surroundings, to be prepared to be changed and transformed. —The Meaning is in the Waiting, by Paula Gooder, p. 29
The book I picked up to read and reflect on this Advent season focuses on 4 biblical characters–one for each candle in the Advent wreath. The first one is Abraham and Sarah, and begins with God’s call to Abraham to “go to a land I will show you…” It is not lost on me that this is where this season of Advent begins for me. A month ago I began a letter to my congregation with a reference to this same passage as I informed them that it is time for me to get ready to leave Advent and move towards the next thing to which I feel called. I am still fairly unclear about where I am going or what I will be doing, but it is time to go.
Gooder makes two observations that intrigue me. First of all, she points out that the word translated “go” in God’s conversation with Abraham can also mean “come.” It depends on where the person is standing in relationship to the person giving the instruction. If the person is far off, the word means “come.” If the person is close by, the word means “let’s go together.” What a different interpretation of the instruction to Abraham to hear God saying, “let’s go together to a land I will show you.” This changes the journey from one where Abraham is looking for that distant land where God is, to a journey where God and Abraham are journeying together.
Secondly, this observation that the call is just as much about an internal journey as it is an external journey, means I don’t always have to change my physical location in order to discover that ‘land I have promised you.’ As a missionary kid, the call to ‘go’ was always understood to be a call to a physical move. I grew up surrounded by stories of people who ‘followed God’s call’ by leaving their family and friends and moving to a country across the world. So in my own journey, I have deferred to a physical move as the ideal expression of following God’s call in my life. In fact, I think I have sometimes used an external journey to avoid the necessary internal journey to change and transformation. But Gooder’s observations lead me to ponder the internal journey I have been on this year. Surprisingly, it has been a journey that has resulted in feeling settled in this place in interesting ways–not just the physical location where I live, but also this physical life I am living. Yes, I am deciding to move, but I can hear the call to “go” much more clearly as a “let’s go together” now than I have been able to hear it in the past.
- What internal and external journeys have been part of your response to the invitation to “go to a land I will show you”?
- In what ways have you experienced the call to “go” as “let’s go together”?
- When have movement and change led to surprising transformation that you couldn’t have predicted on your own?