Where He Leads I Will Follow: Stepping Out in Faith

 

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”  Genesis 12:1

 This study is focusing on obedience, and Abram, later Abraham, is one of the cornerstone stories of obedience in the Bible. Chapter11 of Hebrews is referred to as the “Hall of Faith.” In it, the author catalogs highlights from the past of people who followed God in extreme situations. Obedience is the result of faith. You won’t obey someone you don’t trust. And, interestingly, obedience leads to deeper faith. When we trust God enough to do what He tells us to, and things work out in incredible ways we couldn’t have imagined, we trust God even more.

 I had always remembered the story of Abraham as him being called to leave Ur, his ancestral home, but as I was reading today in Genesis 11, it was actually his father, Terah, that initially picked up his family and moved. He left Ur with the intention of going to Canaan (Genesis 11:31), but he only made it halfway. When the family got to Haran, the Bible says they settled there until Terah died. Then, God called Abram to leave that place and continue the journey on to “the land that I will show you,” (Genesis 12:1). Abram didn’t know where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He didn’t know what dangers he would face. He didn’t know anything really, except that God had told him to pack up and move out. And he did!

 Every once in a while, in life, God will call us to something like this. Maybe He won’t ask us to leave our father’s household and go to a place He will show us, but I’ve known people that have felt called like this. But He will likely call us into a situation or season of the unknown. I’m walking through one of those right now. This week, I began radiation treatment for a brain tumor. So much of what we’re doing is just trying something because the alternative doesn’t leave much to be desired. The expectation my doctor has set for me is that treatment and its recovery will be rough, involving extreme fatigue and nausea as well as heightened vertigo and likely increased migraines, lasting months if not years. And the result? Maybe the tumor will not get much bigger. That doesn’t seem like a glowing recommendation or rallying cry, does it? There’s no way to know if the treatment worked. We will watch the tumor and see if it doesn’t grow, but we won’t know for sure if it doesn't grow because of the radiation or because it’s a slow growing tumor and it just doesn't feel like growing for a while, which is common. The radiation is not expected to remove the tumor, or even shrink it. It will likely make my symptoms a little worse, but the hope is that it will hold them at that spot for a good long while instead of having them continue to increase. They don’t see many cases like mine, Pilocytic Astrocytomas are pretty rare in adults, even more rare in the 4^th ventricle where mine is located, and my doctor has only treated 3 other people with EDS in her 15 years of practice, so no one really knows how this is going to play out. But I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God has put me on this path. One thing after another has shown me that this is God’s plan for me. I could have taken a different path and said, “No,” to radiation, and most people wouldn’t have blamed me. High risk with very little potential reward isn’t super attractive. But God has called me to leave the relative security of what I know and step into a new place, a place that He will show me.

Here’s the Thing: This isn’t the first time God has called me to go somewhere or try something new, something that I don’t know the likely result of before I begin, and I hope it won’t be the last. Each time I’ve grown a little more in my faith and in character – and I am becoming quite the character!