Journeying On By Stages

As Claudia and I were discerning whether to remain in Minnesota or to embark upon an adventure in Virginia, one of the images I was drawn to time and again was the Hebrew Scriptures patriarch of faith, Abram/Abraham. He was settled and contented when God's call came for him to uproot himself, his spouse Sarai/Sarah, his servants and all that he possessed. It was for Abraham and then Sarah an act of faith to leave behind all they knew in order to step through an open door of unknowing.

The verse from Genesis 12 that has captivated me since last October has been this description of Abram's process of moving forward in faith: "He journeyed on in stages" (verse 9). Now that I am freed of my pastoral responsibilities for a short period of time, I remind myself on a regular basis that each task I accomplish (as mundane as it is) is part of the process of my journeying on in stages.

Yesterday in my office this is what journeying on in stages looks like. My sons Rand, John and Ben kindly moved 30 boxes of books (each weighing about 60 pounds) from my office yesterday to our garage, where eventually they will be packed in our Pod for moving in three weeks. I estimate I am a little more than half finished with my office packing.

Clearing my church office is a tedious process of packing books, sorting through documents to shred and documents to pass on to my successor, and cleaning up the computer hard drive. It's more than tedium, of course, because each of the documents I sort through has a person's (or more than one person's) name on it, people who have been part of my staff or my Leadership Team or the congregation.  So there's the emotional piece of saying goodbye in a thousand ways again and again.  I'm trying to develop a spiritual practice of quietly holding in prayer each person whose name I encounter, releasing them to God's good care and keeping.

Today I have been working from home, cleaning drawers, packing boxes, sorting and disposing. In many ways it's quite therapeutic and probably the least intense move I've ever made, largely because our kids are all nearly grown up and mostly out of the house. I can remember all too well what it was like to pack and move when our children were under the age of 11. Yet, we journeyed on by stages then, and I'm doing the same thing now. Fortunately, over the years I have developed more patience and endurance for this prolonged kind of process.