Running Away?
It was mentioned to us the other day that this travelling around Australia is just our way of running away. Hmmmm.
Last year I probably would have agreed with them - we were desperate to get out of our current life and all its hassles and strife - ‘Stop the world! We want to get off!!’ And we were running away (not that we would have agreed), if things had worked out, we would have run all the way to the Mornington Peninsula…and our hassles and strife would have followed us there too!
Fortunately we have a good God, a great God and he foiled us in our attempts to run away. So now, now we are no longer running away, it is more like we are ‘running towards’. It’s true, we don’t have a destination and if everything goes to plan (ie, we are able to be financially viable while we travel), we don’t really have a set time frame. And given all we’ve been through and continue to go through I guess it would be really easy for others who don’t really know the situation and all the thought and prayers behind it all, to think that we might just be trying to run away from all our problems.
But as I’ve just said, we believe we are running to, not away from. God has called us out. He wants us to leave home, leave the church that’s been our home for the last almost 13 years and not go back to our families either (which is what would have happened if we’d moved down to the Mornington Peninsula). He wants us to follow him, to chase after him and he wants to reignite the dreams and desires in our hearts, he wants to fan the flames so we can be truly alive, the way we are meant to be instead of just existing.
In a way, packing up our lives and heading off into the ‘wild blue yonder’ will get rid of some of our current problems, but I sincerely doubt that it will make things easier. In fact, the only thing that I can see being easier is that if we have an RV or caravan, there won’t be as much cleaning for me to do! However, I know this great adventure of ours is going to bring with it a whole set of new hassles and strife, but really, hassles and strife are just a normal part of life and without them we would never change as there would be no need to.
I don’t particularly like life’s problems, but then, if we hadn’t been going through the tough time we’ve had, I don’t think we would have stopped long enough to really take stock and evaluate our lives. When we did that, we realised that we were not living the life we wanted to live and we weren’t really doing any of the things we’d always wanted to do, we just kept putting them off for one reason or another. And although life has been hard, we wouldn’t trade it for an easier one because then we would not have learnt the lessons that have flowed from these experiences.
Besides, we’re beginning to see life’s problems not as problems, but as challenges; challenges to be explored and worked through; challenges that will help me, help Tim and help us as a family to grow and become all that God has created us to be and live the life he has created us to live.
So,
Running away? No.
Running to? Yes!
Running towards God, towards the abundant life, you know, the ‘life to the full’ that Jesus promised, the life that God created us to live; running back towards our hearts and the deepest dreams and desires that God has placed there and capturing them once again. Running towards the open arms of our Father as a child runs towards their daddy and is caught up in their daddy’s strong arms and swung up into the air, all the while laughing and squealing with delight as their daddy swings them up and around as he too laughs with unbounded joy.
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