picking up your lost dreams

a calling may not be as unfamiliar as you think

Today in Church we heard a story that’s familiar to anyone who attends church often: the call of Abram (later known as Abraham). Genesis 12 begins like this:

Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. . . So Abram went, as the Lord had told him. . . Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot . . . and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.

A few pages on (15.5), the Lord repeats this call, and this time, as Abram looks up at a dark, midnight sky, the Lord says:

“Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then the Lord said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

From the way we customarily tell this story, beginning at Genesis 12:1, it’s easy to gain the impression that God’s call came to Abram right out of the blue. That Abram was living in his home town, just minding his own business, when God called him to leave everything he’d ever known and embark on a brand new, previously unimagined journey. And from this we can extrapolate the idea that this is the shape of any calling from God: unexpected, dramatic, and unrelated to whatever it was you were doing before.

But read the whole narrative, and you’ll find this is not the case. You only have to go back a few verses earlier, in chapter 11, to discover that Abram had already started this journey many years earlier, along with his father, Terah:

Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there.

They were en route to Canaan already, but a brief stop in Haran became a longer stay, until eventually they settled down and somehow forgot the journey.

There’s no way of knowing why Terah, Abram and the rest settled down. But I do know that for people everywhere, there are moments in life where even quite important things get put on the back burner because there simply isn’t enough bandwidth to do everything. You put your special interests aside — just for a while — because you are raising kids, or because your career eats up all your time, or you have elderly parents who need caring for, or . . . or . . .or . . .
These are all perfectly good reasons for settling down and focusing on the family for a while. But often those things that seemed to be life’s great purpose simply get sidelined, and then it seems impossible to pick them back up.

It was right after his father died that Abram heard God call him again. Those kind of life changes — a death in the family, a career shift, the kids leaving home — they leave a door open for a moment of transition. For Abram, losing his father opened him up to thinking about what life would look like now. And just at that moment, he heard God calling again. Not, as it turns out, to some radical, unexpected, unimagined vision, but to pick up where he left off, and complete the journey. It was less ‘follow me into the unknown’, and more ‘isn’t it time to finish what you started?’

Is there something you have put on the back burner? Maybe you’re in a season right now where your energy is all needed elsewhere, and if so, you have enough to be thinking about already. But if, like me, you find that doors are opening up once again and you’re not sure what’s on the other side, it’s not a bad idea to remember those things you parked while you were bringing up the kids, or guiding your institution through COVID, or whatever. As you look up into the starry sky, it could be that all you need to do is remember where the journey was headed before you settled down, and pick up where you left off.