The barrels are in the front room. Two blue plastic drums, half-filled with bed sheets, pots, a framed photograph of your grandparents wrapped in a towel. The ticket is booked. Your mother has stopped arguing and started praying out loud in the next room, which is somehow worse. After thirty-two years in the same yard, with the same neighbours, the same church and the same mango tree, you are leaving.
Maybe you are going to Toronto for work, or to Birmingham to join a spouse. Maybe you are only moving across the parish, out of your parents’ house into a place of your own. Either way, the pull of the familiar is strong, and the future is mostly blank.
A man who left his father’s house
Abraham’s story begins with a call to leave. “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1, NKJV). No map. No address. Just a promise and a direction.
Later, in Genesis 15, when Abraham is still waiting for the child God had promised, we read one of the most important sentences in Scripture: “And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:6, NKJV). Abraham’s right standing with God did not rest on how well he had performed. It rested on trust.
The New Testament returns to Abraham again and again. Hebrews says that by faith he obeyed and went out, not knowing where he was going (Hebrews 11:8). James points out that his faith was shown in what he did (James 2:21-22). Belief and action were not separate. His faith had luggage.
Faith that packs boxes
Many of us picture faith as something that happens inside, in quiet moments of prayer. It does. But Abraham’s faith also looked like loading animals, saying goodbye to relatives and setting out along a road he had never walked. Faith, in his life, had very practical consequences.
A move is one of the places where our faith gets practical too. It shows up in decisions about whether to sell the house or rent it out, whether to take the job, who will look after an ageing parent, which church to visit first in a new city. It shows up in the courage to sign a lease in a place where nobody knows your name.
That does not mean every move is a call from God, or that staying put is a lack of faith. Some are called to go; others are called to stay and hold the family land, care for parents or serve a community that others have left. The point is not the direction but the trust. Whether you go or stay, faith is believing that God is with you and acting as though that is true.
What we leave behind
Leaving is rarely clean. Abraham took his nephew Lot with him, and that relationship brought its own complications. We, too, carry things with us: unresolved family tensions, guilt about who is left caring for whom, questions about the house and the land back home.
It can help to leave well. Have the honest conversation with your siblings about your parents’ care before you go. Put arrangements for any property you are leaving in writing. Make sure someone trustworthy has the keys and knows what to do if the roof leaks. Say goodbye properly to the neighbour who watched you grow up. Faith does not excuse us from these practical kindnesses. It gives us the courage to face them.
A land that God will show you
The phrase “a land that I will show you” is both frightening and comforting. Frightening, because Abraham did not know where he was going. Comforting, because God did. The destination was not up to Abraham to discover alone. It would be shown.
Hebrews adds that Abraham was ultimately looking for “the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10, NKJV). Every earthly home, however much we love it, is a tent compared with that. It is a freeing thought when you are standing among half-packed barrels. You are not leaving your only home. You are moving between tents, on the way to a city God himself is building.
For reflection
- Is God asking me to step out in some way, or to stay faithfully where I am? How do I know?
- If I am leaving, what would it look like to leave well: with people, with property and with unfinished conversations?
A short prayer: Lord, you called Abraham out of his father’s house, and he trusted you. Give me that kind of faith: not only to believe, but to act. Go with me into the places I do not know, and keep those I leave behind in your care. Amen.
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