~ Being Real ~

Disciple: Day 22 (Again)

When I started the readings last week I felt totally lost: I didn’t know what I should be looking for or getting out of it. But my mom got a Disciple book this Sunday, so I’m using it and it really helps to have the “assignment” for the week four readings: “read in great sweeps the ancestral sagas of the Bible. . . . Read rapidly, being concerned not about detail but about gaining a sense of history, a feeling for a people called for a special mission.”

Re-reading “the call of Abram” and “covenant with God,” I’m struck by how fantastical it all sounds. I mean, Genesis 12 goes through the genealogy from Shem to Abram, and then bam! the Lord tells Abram to “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation…” It’s completely incredible in the most literal sense of the word [in (not)-credible (believable)].

Thinking about how long it took me to even respond to God’s call for me to go on a short term mission to Grenada, I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for Abram to just pack everything up and leave all that was familiar to him at God’s say-so. Crazy.

And the story keeps getting crazier. God tells Abram when he’s in Canaan that this is the land his offspring will be given, but then tells Abram to keep going. So he does. If it was me, I’d want to stay put and work at establishing myself in the land; I wouldn’t just trust God to give it to me; I’d work out the logistics and try to make things start happening—“God helps those who help themselves,” right?—and in the process I’d totally screw everything up.

That’s not the only “incredible” thing God promises Abram. He also tells him Abram he will be a father of a great nation even though he’s currently childless and his wife is well past a child-bearing age. Again, Abram believes God.

It boggles the mind. I mean, he has so much faith in God that he just goes out and does what God tells him. Me, I have a hard time accepting that he loves me as much as the Bible says he does—forget about acting on God’s promises!