The words introduce a passage which speaks of God’s sudden intervention and the calling of Abraham who obeyed and ‘set out without knowing where he was going’ (Heb 11:8). He was still a wanderer but now he had an assurance that God was with him and was leading him even if he himself did not understand fully what was going on.
How much we long to know where we are going! What is going to happen to me? How will I manage with my family? When I get into serious problems I cannot wait for God. He does not seem to help. Let me try some traditional ways. Let me try some medicine, some goblins or some other method of solving my problem. And yet all the while our Christian heritage affirms:
The Lord is close to all who call him, who call on him from their hearts.
He grants the desires of those who fear him, he hears their cry and he saves them. (Psalm 145)
It is ultimately a question of my worldview, the way I see my life in the world in which I live. No one can escape taking up an attitude towards life. Our friends, the birds and the animals from whom we evolved, spend their life alert to danger. As they feed and as they rest they always have one eye and one ear trained to threatening sounds, sights and smells. And some humans too can share that basic instinct of fear at every turn. They wander in their own savannah never totally at peace. They cannot feel sure in the knowledge that there is a God who loves them and will ALWAYS come to their help if they cry to him no matter what the political or economic situation is. So they wander on, always searching for quick solutions.
There are others –and we have all met them – who are poor and struggle every day. But they have a deep peace born of their faith. They do not know where they are going, no more than Abraham did. But that causes them no anxiety. They had the sort of trust in God that he had:
I hold myself in quiet and silence, like a little child in its mother’s arms. (Psalm 130)
Post published in: Faith