Taking a Leap of Faith

My family just moved into a new house. It is a faculty house belonging to my seminary where I teach and I am delighted to get to live there. The move went well - for about a day. Then I got sick and ended up in the hospital having two surgical procedures in two days.

Luckily, we had family coming to help with the move and they did more than could possibly be expected of family members during a move. They helped us clean, unpack boxes, and hang pictures. They helped us shop for new items for the house, carried out trash by the barrel, and helped us get organized. I am so grateful they were all here to help us out while I was sick and recovering from my surgery.

Today we were listing moves we made as a family. Since my birth I have lived in 21 different homes. That is 21 different moves. Some were just across town. Some were across country. Some were when I was too young to help. Some were with my own son who barely remembers the move. Some were painful and some were joyous.

Moving is never easy. Packing up and moving means saying goodbye to one reality and hello to a new one. Saying it 21 times means saying a lot of goodbyes to realities.

When I was a kid there were moves that made me angry. As an adult several of my moves were to grand new adventures - to college, to my first job, to attend seminary, to serve my first church, to grad school to get my PhD, to my first teaching job, and to Philly to teach at Lutheran. These were amazing new adventures.

But each and every one of them required a leap of faith. The moves required a sense of trust in the possibilities ahead. That trust is sometimes hard to come by. But trust must be lived out in the midst of change.

My prayer for this move and for the ways your life is changing is that trust comes to you. It takes small leaps of faith - trusting that God is present in the midst of the change, trusting that things will work themselves out, and trusting that you are not alone in the journey.

I'm leaping here, people. Wanna jump with me?