leaving
The Cloud has lifted, and God is on the move. He’s taking me somewhere new, and I’ve heard Him. Go.
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”
Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it, he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
“He said, Go…(Isaiah 6: 5-9)
But it’s not the go with which I struggle. It’s the leaving.
This morning, Adam rushed, flinging the door open and hurrying to the van. He’d not even had time to turn on the overhead light or punch the button to open the garage door so that the sunlight could flood in. He sat in the dark, waiting.
It might seem, from the beginning, that Adam desperately wanted to go, the way I want to, the way I’ve always thought Abram did all those years ago when God came to Him. I’ve wondered what that must’ve been like, the man who worshiped many gods encountering The One, it all finishing with a fire lit in his belly to leave home, family, everything he knew for something he’d never seen, a place God would show him (Genesis 12). Go. Leave. Before I began Beth Moore’s study on the Patriarchs, I always thought of Ur as a wasteland, as though Abram had somewhere to go and nothing much to leave. Not so. Ur was a busy place.
Ever since The Garden, God has been about movement, walking there in the cool of the day—sending, going, becoming, burning, breathing. He is not a sedentary God. He never has been settled over our estrangement. He told the untrusting multitudes of Israelites that they would wander in the desert for 40 years (Numbers 32:13), and even though their clothes never wore out and they never lacked for food (Numbers 8:3,4), they walked. They went. For years, I thought of that only as an iron-hard punishment for their lack of faith, this delay of their arrival and dwelling in the land, but I realize now, as a parent, that the going, the walking, was a productive penalty for those who would one day be allowed to enter the Promised Land. It’s been God’s way, teaching through journey. It isn’t cold, the sending forth. Adam and Eve were sent; Cain told he’d wander; David moved as a shepherd and then as a soldier chased by a mad king; Jesus traveled from place to place to teach with dust clinging to his feet; Paul journeyed, even shipwrecked, as a missionary.
Recently, I read a book called The Sacred Journey, one I hope to review for you soon. It’s a beautiful book by Charles Foster about pilgrimage and things I’ve never considered about God’s love for the fringes of society and the dedicated, unfettered hearts of nomads. It opened my eyes to themes in scripture I’d never noticed, and ended powerfully,
The Buddha’s last words to his disciples were, “Walk on.” The first words of Jesus to his were rather different: “Follow me.” Jesus said some other things, too, but as a summary of the four Gospels, “Let’s go for a walk together” is not bad (212).
It’s become cliche to say that life is a pilgrimage, but Jacob had the wisdom to call it that (Genesis 47:9), and it is. All our days in this dry and weary land, we go, and we never thirst as long as we move when He moves. If necessary, He’ll draw water from a rock. Pilgrimage teaches trust and dependence, it liberates, makes us spiritually lean, and lately I’ve come to see that I can’t take a step apart from Him guiding my foot, pointing at roots in the path. But God is a God who moves, not a God who rushes. It’s the rushing that signals something amiss. It always has with me, too.
I think Adam had anticipated my coming, expected to hear me say, “Okay, everyone ready to go?” But my footsteps sounded on the stairs a little sooner than he’d calculated. Timing never is quite what we expect. I walked into the kitchen as Adam’s backpack disappeared out the back door. And I know my son. He doesn’t hurry off to school unless he’s up to something.
This is the child, a bit more like Jonah when it comes to going, who spent the whole last school year trying to change my mind about dropping him off at school. When declaring repeatedly unto infinity, “No school today,” had not helped, he’d start negotiating pick up times with me. Autism has its strengths, and perseverance has certainly shown itself to be one of them in our household.
“1:15,” he’d say.
“No. 3:45, today.”
“2:45,” he’d try, unsuccessfully.
By the time we had arrived at school, we had had endless and fruitless conversations about the issue. Well, fruitless for him. I was secretly just thrilled he felt so motivated to talk to me. I’ll talk to him about anything, even if I have to say “no” over and over again, just to hear his voice. I wonder if that’s how God feels sometimes when my prayers are more like negotiations, that it doesn’t matter, as long as I am focused on Him and talking? On those days last year, Adam would try to convince me, as we rolled through carpool, that it was “Riley, Zoe’s turn school,” indicating, of course, that it was unfortunately not Adam’s turn. It made me think of Moses, standing there in front of that fiery bush just after God told him to go, begging God to send someone else (Exodus 4:13).
As one of the teachers opened Adam’s door and I looked back at him and answered, “Sorry, buddy. It’s your turn for school today too,” he’d groan and reluctantly climb out of the car.
We never could figure out why he argued and complained so much about going; his teacher said he always seemed happy at school, once the matter of the actual leaving had been dismissed. But then, that’s always the way it is for me, too. God says go, and it’s the leaving that I stumble over, not the journey itself.
In reality, I hunger for journey, relish the walking. The first time I took Kevin to meet my parents, we spent an entire day walking around the city, wandering. We explored and experienced Place with unhindered freedom, pausing as we wished, eating when we were hungry, discovering, tasting, learning. There are days when I look at him and say, “Oh to sleep when we’re tired and eat when we’re hungry,” and he knows what I mean, the longing to be unburdened of time and Responsibility. Just to walk. The abiding wish to go. On the coast, when it’s just me, I walk for hours. I’d run, like Forrest Gump, but I have old knees, and well, it seems this body is the thing that really gets in the way of just going with God. The Spirit never once takes on static form. He’s always a fire (1 Thess. 5:19), a wind (John 3: 8), a breath (John 20:22). But the leaving, that’s hard. Leaving means something left, something missed, a sacrifice, surrender.
This year, Adam hardly complains about school, but he’s usually so absorbed in some activity that he’s in no great hurry to leave. That’s when God’s call to something new is so difficult for me too, when I’m absorbed in my own limited perspective, absorbed in activity. So, this morning, watching him blur out the door made me chuckle. I called after him, “Um, Adam, do you have just one George in that book bag?”
He mumbled something about his timer, which I could see plainly in his hand as I watched him scramble into the van.
Zoe appeared behind me, looking breezy and put together. “Mom, you should probably check his book bag,” she said, suspicion making her serious.
Lately, Adam has started getting sneaky, and I am fascinated by it. For my Spectrum two, development almost always shows up first as a departure from rigidity which involves some undesirable behavior that I have to train and discipline them to change. But isn’t that always the way it is? Growth breeds the courage to take risks, and Relationship is built on navigating new paths and learning how to tread rightly on them.
I don’t know why Adam has a compulsion to take everything he owns everywhere he goes, but he does. Last week, as we left for the park, Adam appeared with two tote bags stuffed with as many of his favorite toys as possible. He looked at me and said, “Four white baskets?” That’s Adam for, “Hey Mom, can you give me a hand with the four white baskets on my shelves?” The baskets held everything he couldn’t fit into the tote bags.
I realize, thinking about my son, that the two of us have the same sickness. The true pilgrim knows how to leave well, without strapping everything she owns (or in my case, everything she’s been doing) to her back. The joy in the walking comes partly because it happens lightly, with only the barest necessities. The trouble is, how do I leave it? And is the issue really an issue of trust, me failing to lay it all down, as though God can’t manage to keep it safe and see it rightly done without my supervision?
So, I wasn’t surprised the day Adam came home with the note pinned to the black strap on his backpack, the one that said, “Adam can bring only one George to school. All other toys and books must stay at home.” Adam and I had discussed, before the note, or rather I had discussed in his presence, that he really didn’t need his notebooks, calculator, stuffed furry friends, Curious George books, timer, ball, Giggleator noise machine, camera, and motorized car for school. Once before, I had intercepted him and removed the entire contents of his bedroom from his book bag.
And so it is with me, I see, as I realize that every time God tells me to go to some place that He will show me, the thing that stalls me is the leaving behind. These days, I feel like God is moving me, telling me to go, and I can’t figure out what to leave behind. Everything I do feels important and necessary. Mine is not a physical going, not now, not at a time when God has placed me where I need to be to raise my children, not when I can’t even find enough time out from household management to walk around the neighborhood. How am I, I wonder, to take that walk with Jesus? Mine is a spiritual tug to a new season, to a place only He can show me. The idea of walking with Him, free of all else, that thrills me. But I feel like right now I’m standing in the doorway with my tote bags and my baskets, answering, “Okay, ready.”
He whispers, the Burning Fire, perhaps with the same sigh I always have for Adam. “No, you can’t take all of that with you.”
And I’m just trying to figure out whether He’s asking me to leave it all, as He did Abram, or doing what we all do with Adam, placing one thing in my hands to say, “Just this.”
When Adam’s teacher pinned the note to his book bag, she explained, shielding her eyes from the sun that afternoon, that she hoped this written rule would help. Well, it would’ve helped the old Adam. The new Adam, the growing one, just tries to sneak his way around it.
Fortunately for me, he’s a sneaking newbie, so he’s not really very good at it yet. Part of that I can attribute to a universal fault: thinking the way he thinks is the way everyone else thinks. So incomprehensible are social cues to my son that I am sure he figures none of the rest of us can read the flashing red arrows that point to his deception.
And I wonder, am I trying to be sneaky with God that way? Is rushing more really the answer, trying to carry everything with me instead of allowing Him, trusting Him, to gently remove it from my clinched fists? Do I think, somewhere in the shadows of my heart, that He doesn’t notice my subversiveness?
The leaving, that’s hard.
But my heart thrills for new lands, and these days I feel more determined than ever to surrender to the lover of my soul. I want to put the bags down and open my hands, and I’m pleading with Him in prayer, “Please. You show me what to take.”
So this morning, as I slid into the car, I checked Adam’s book bag. One George, one clear ball filled with glitter and a flashing light, one timer. I sighed. Well, at least it wasn’t two tote bags and four white baskets.
