Moving On

My wife and I have recently sold our home and over the past few days I have been moving our stuff from our “sold” home to our new home. It’s amazing the amount of stuff we had, especially considering that only six years ago my wife, our two children and myself, came to North America with only the clothes on our backs and four suitcases. So in the last six years we have again, amassed a whole load of stuff.

Anyways, I’m not here to rabbit on about our stuff, but about moving on. Over the past twenty years that my wife and I have been together it seems that we have been constantly moving on. In that time we have lived in over a dozen apartments and houses, started and successfully ran three businesses, and moved half way around the world from our home in the UK to begin again. In the last six years, since being here in Canada, I have pastored in three churches, graduated from seminary, and last year I founded HardcoreFaith.com.

Moving on. I love it – the chance to meet new people, to see and experience new things and places, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, it can be emotionally draining and may be both time consuming and costly, as in moving all the stuff. But if I had the choice of staying put and living in routine and the same old same old, or moving on – even though there may be some discomfort and uncertainty – I would take moving on every time.

However, I will say this, in the past eight years my wife and I have only moved on when God says for us to do so. Coming to Canada, studying in seminary, pastoring in three separate churches, and beginning HardcoreFaith.com – all of this was guided by the Holy Spirit and the Word. And I want to make it extremely clear that my wife and I would never move on if God told us to stay put.

However, I believe the reason we have been moved on so much is that we are willing to, as there are so many believers who are just plain unwilling to move on. I have lost count at the amount of people I have spoken to who say they would love to move on but are afraid to do so.

I remember teaching about this very thing a few years ago when one Sunday morning I spoke about Abraham and how God throughout his life moved him on. For example, sometime around 2100 B.C., God appeared to Abram, a man living in the city of Ur and said, “Pull up stakes. Leave where you are, and go to the land I will show you….” Genesis 12:1 He was told that if he did, God would make him into a great nation and that all people would be blessed because of his faith to move on. If we continue to follow Abraham’s story we see that he was someone who was first and foremost open to God’s leading – he was a man who constantly listened for God’s voice. And he wasn’t too afraid of change.

The problem as I see it (if you can call it a problem) is that many people do not like change. I would even hazard a guess to say that there are many believers who have been told by God to move on but have not acted on God’s guiding. Why is this? Well, it could be that they are fearful of what will happen. Maybe they don’t like being unsure and uncertain as to how things will pan out. Maybe they like their comfort zones a little too much.

In many of the churches I have attended or pastored there are those people who don’t even like to change seats on a Sunday morning. I remember a couple of years ago I tried to get people to change it up a little by swapping seats with someone… it didn’t go down too well

All this to say that it seems that people are not that open to God’s leading if it involves them moving out of their comfort zone. Sure, they’ll take vacations and leave their homes, jobs and day to day lives to go and visit somewhere for a couple of weeks, but a vacation means one thing – they get to go home. Now I’m not saying this is wrong because maybe it’s God will for you to stay put. But like the old saying goes, “Some journeys we choose to go on – Sometimes the journey chooses us!”

The question then is, “Am I listen and open to God’s guiding in this matter?” Because what if God came to you and said, “Pull up stakes. Leave where you are, and go and do what I want you to…” Would you be willing?

Christian St John M.Div, BChM, ACS
May, 2009

Picture by Benjamin Earwicker