Where He Leads I Will Follow: Right Away

 

On that very day Abraham took his son Ishmael and all those born in his household or bought with his money, every male in his household, and circumcised them, as God told him. Genesis 17:23

 Over the last several years, God has taught me that when I know I need to do something, I should do it right away. This started out because I might get distracted, or the action would fall to the bottom of my to-do list. These days, it has a lot more to do with memory. If I don’t do it right now, I won’t do it at all because I’ll likely not recall that I’m supposed to! Every once in a while, I really don’t want to do something and I put it off, and God keeps bringing it up to me, reminding me either internally or externally through those around me. But realistically, when I feel like God is instructing me to do something, I either stop what I’m doing and take care of it right away, or else I set a calendar or phone reminder to do it at the appropriate time if necessary. I actually just did this as I was working on this post!

 Why is it important to do something right away? Take Abraham’s call to circumcision. Wouldn’t it have been more practical to do a few of these a day over a period of time? That would have left some of the men available to guard or do the jobs necessary instead of knocking them all out of commission at once. Think about it though. I could see a few problems with spreading it out. If the rumors started that Abraham was going to cutting off people’s foreskins a few at a time, the panic would start. The longer people had to think about this, the less likely they were to be compliant. Maybe they would start an uprising against him! Perhaps some would run away. This is an awfully scary thing after all! But Abraham led by example, circumcising both himself and his 13 year old son. He lined them up and got it done. Was it hard? You bet! Not one of those guys was likely excited to do this. It hurt! And not just for a moment. I looked up what the healing process for an adult circumcision today was like and you’re looking at a typical course of 10 days, but that’s with modern over-the-counter pain medication, ice packs and Vaseline, none of which were available in Abraham’s time.

 So, when God has called us to something, especially a hard thing, it’s a good idea to begin it right away. This helps us to avoid backing out because of fear, and I think in the long run it actually makes it easier. I wrote a while back about eating your frog as Mark Twain put it.

 Mark Twain’s recommendation was realistically to get the hard/miserable/difficult things out of the way first and the rest of what you need to do will be easy by comparison. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it, but that doesn’t make it easy to do all the time.

Here’s the Thing: I think it was super smart of Abraham to obey God right away and have himself and his household circumcised that very day. He avoided a lot of potential troubles and put himself in healthy alignment with God. This is a lesson that I can take to heart and apply to my own life.