The Unexpected Pleasures of the Long Journey Home

Call me Abraham. Abram if you wish. That was my name before. “Great Father” it means. Imagine that. A 75 year old childless man with a name like Abram! It’s like calling a big man Tiny or a man with no right arm Lefty. Abram – the great father – right.

I guess I should have been more patient. After all, God had proven over and over that age was no obstacle to doing great things. Noah was 600 years old before he started living up to his name. And after he came off the ark he lived another 350 years. What’s 75 compared to 950? My own father, Terah, was 70 years old before he had children. But at 75 I didn’t exactly feel like a spring chicken. And I was unprepared when God came calling.

Now my family is prone to wandering. I remember the day when my father told us we were going to Canaan. It seemed like insanity. I had heard of Canaan before, but it was on the other side of the world. To leave Ur and travel the arc of the Fertile Crescent? It was the journey of a lifetime and there was no coming back and no assurances that we would find anything worthwhile when we got there. Canaan was a small strip on the edge of the Great Sea, between the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. To go to this place would be like going to…the Eastern Shore.

There was something in my father’s eyes, though, that kept us silent. He never talked about the reasons why we had to go, but he was a bundle of vision and fear. Some wild and terrifying thing had gripped him. With each mile we traveled beside the Euphrates River he would grow more anxious, scanning the horizon as if to catch a glimpse of a coming cloud and looking back over his shoulder at the home we had left behind.

By the time we reached Haran he had had enough. Canaan would have to wait. We settled in that new place and I came to know it as home. No one talked about Canaan any more. Canaan was my father’s folly. But at night I sometimes dreamed about it. Without even knowing what it looked like, I would see myself there – a stranger in a strange land. A stranger with two sons. Once Sarai woke me up from one of these dreams. A fierce wind was blowing from the west across the dusty hills. “Wake up,” she said. “You were having a nightmare.”

“No,” I said, “I was only seeing what God put in my heart to see.”

“But you were crying out.”

“Yes, but not in fear, Sarai. In joy. I was crying out in joy.”

Then one day it happened. I was sitting beneath a tree on a hillside in Haran. I had just finished transacting some business with Elihud-ben-Jacob. I am a pretty shrewd manager of flocks and properties and I had become very successful in Haran. This little deal was particularly satisfying and I leaned back against a tree to enjoy the moment.

I was just beginning to think about the new workers I would have to get to manage my new acquisitions when Yahweh spoke. Who knows whether it was out loud or not? I suspect only I heard it because I remember looking around me. The goatherds down the hill continued to swap stories. The flocks didn’t start. The hillside didn’t melt away. Surely something more would have happened if God had spoken out loud. But I heard it as clearly as you are hearing me speak to you now. There was no mistaking the voice. It was as familiar as scent of my mother’s cooking. As ancient as the rocks. As intimate as Sarai’s laughter in my ear.

“Leave.” That was Yahweh’s first word to me. Leave. No introductions. No formalities. No explanations. Just get up and get out. “Leave your land and your kin and the house of your father and go to the land that I will show you.” But I didn’t really need any introductions. This journey that God was sending me on was the one I had been dreaming about since my father had packed us up to leave Ur. I even knew where we were going.

The blessing was something else. Yahweh said, “I will make of you a great people and I will bless you and increase your name and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse. By you all the clans of the earth will be blessed.” It was too much to take in and it made no sense. God promised descendents – that I would live up to the name that was given to me – but there was the obvious question of ‘how?’ And then to be a blessing to all the clans of the earth? It was more than any one person could be. I got the feeling that God knew a lot more about what the promise meant than I would ever know.

So then what? Well, then I went home. Sarai found me giving instructions to my nephew Lot about how to arrange for the sale of our property. She didn’t say a word. She knew. When I asked her about it later she said, “I always knew we weren’t finished.”

“You knew?” I asked her.

“I knew. You’re not the only one who has dreams, you know.”

“But what Yahweh told me was so impossible. The blessing was about descendents and my name and none of that can be unless…”

Sarah laughed. She put a hand to my cheek and said, “Unless we stop thinking that the way things are is the way Yahweh wants them to stay. Are you saying that you’re too old for God to use?”

We packed a ridiculous amount of stuff. Looking back on it now I know that it was insurance…my way of saying, “Just in case this doesn’t work out…Just in case Yahweh is wrong.” All the property I could load on donkeys and hand carts. All the people I had picked up along the way. They had no say in this. They didn’t get this call from God. I did. But I needed them to go with me.

Because deep down I felt my father’s anxiety. What I had never understood before suddenly became very clear. The vision and the fear. The wondering and the uncertainty. Suddenly I knew that when the river ran out, my father had to stop. All that were left were the hills and then Canaan beyond. But he couldn’t take the risk. Who knows what assurance he had relied on to get him that far? What blessing did Yahweh give to him? Or was his stopping really just the beginning of my journey?

It never really stopped. Even when I got to Canaan it wasn’t over. It wasn’t like the land was empty. It was called Canaan because the Canaanites lived there. So there were conflicts and battles. And there were famines. Almost as soon as we arrived we had to go to Egypt to seek out food. But at each place we stopped I built an altar.

Beneath a great tree I heard Yahweh speak once more. “To your offspring, I will give this land.” It came like a whisper but it had the weight of stone, so I gathered some together and made an altar. Later near Bethel, I build another altar.

Then there was that final altar. When the child had come. When the promise finally seemed possible. When it was all coming together. That’s when God came again and asked me to make a sacrifice of Isaac, that promised child. In the end God stayed my hand. I guess Yahweh knew I was still learning the courage that would allow me to stand up for the promise, but I remember that moment. I stood on top of that mountain before that makeshift altar with the knife blade raised and it was all there – the wild horizon and the deep terror. No, it never got better, but Yahweh never left me.

What I came to learn is that the ways of God are mysterious and the journeys God asks us to undertake are not easy or safe. They demand our entire selves, our very lives. They take us far from the places we know to places we never imagined ourselves going.

But here is something else that I have learned: There is always a blessing, even if its full realization lies off beyond the rim of the world. It was that that I came to trust. That caravan of things and people that I dragged with me over the hills to Canaan? Those were signs of the person that I had been. I had been Abram the son Terah, the one who made deals and collected wealth. Now I had a new identity – Abraham – father of nations, blessing to the world, blessed by Yahweh. And Yahweh had a new identity as well. Forever after, this God would be the God of Abraham.

That’s pretty arbitrary. Yahweh could as easily have been known as the God of Harold or the God of Nahor or the God of Rebecca. There was nothing special about me in the long run. But I wonder how many other times God has spoken to a person sitting under a tree, or standing by a road, or working in a field, or on a boat, or in a dream, and called them to leave what they were doing. And how many times did they not hear? How many times did you not hear? How many times did I not hear? And nobody took a risk that the world and their lives could be different. What blessings have we missed because we didn’t believe that God could be speaking to us? Or maybe we didn’t trust that God would be there if we did listen and follow.

I remember one day in the Negev. We had traveled through the whole of Canaan. I had built altars and heard God talk to me once again. I knew that this was going to be home now. We were traveling through the desert – the most barren desert you can imagine. Just rock and sand and dirt and bare hillsides pockmarked with small caves.

Off to the west a dark cloud suddenly appeared and began to move toward us. We could watch it coming for miles and there was lightning flashing from a thunderhead. We climbed up into a small cave to wait out the storm.

It was incredible to watch. The rain came down like a waterfall. Darkness covered the whole valley in front of us but when the lightning flashed we could see that a wadi below had turned almost instantly into a raging river. As the thunder passed into the distance, we heard that river roaring below us.

The sun reemerged and we came out from the caves. The air quickly became as dry as it had been before. The water receded in the wadi. But something else happened. All around us flowers bloomed. Small yellow flowers carpeted the ground. Sharp, spiny plants broke out in orange blooms. All throughout that desert there was life waiting to break forth. All it took was a little bit of water and what seemed dead was alive.

I can’t help thinking that God did the same miracle in me. Me, who was used to thinking of myself as a dry, dead desert. Me, who saw no seed, no future, no hope. Me, who could only dream about something new. There were flowers in the desert yet for me. All it took was that voice, that little bit of water, and a dead man came to life.

Seems like God has a habit of doing that. I don’t think I’m the only one who ever started traveling again when he thought his traveling days were through. Home is not what I left. It’s where I’m headed. And there are unexpected pleasures on the long journey home.

When we left Haran…when we had all that stuff we didn’t need packed and ready to go…Sarai looked over at me. I looked off towards the hills that we would soon be crossing. Then I looked back at her with what I’m sure was the same look my father had on his face. All she said was, “Abram, don’t look back. Just don’t look back.” Thanks be to God.

Genesis 12:1-9
Then YHWH said to Abram, “Leave your land and your kin and the house of your father for the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great people and I will bless you and increase your name and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse. By you all the clans of the earth will be blessed.”
So Abram left, just as YHWH told him to do and Lot left with him. Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, the son of his brother, all the private property he had acquired and all the people they had acquired in Haran. They set off walking to the land of Canaan and they arrived in the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land as far as the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. The Canaanites were in the land at that time.
Then YHWH appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So Abram built an altar to YHWH, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country east of Bethel, where he pitched a tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the west. There he built an altar to YHWH and called on the name of YHWH. Then Abram pulled up stakes and went to. He pulled up stakes for the Negev.