The Journey Actually Begins

The Journey Actually Begins
NUMBERS 9: 15-10: 36

Although I make decisions easily (though this does not mean I make them wisely), when it was a question of deciding to take my disabled wife six thousand miles from Britain to California to a place we had visited only once and where we couldn’t be sure everything would work out, even I could recognize that the move contained an element of risk. Undoing the decision and the move, however, would be horrendously complicated. I was therefore grateful when God provided unasked-for signs that it was the right decision. One day a student at my seminary sensed God saying to her, “Tell John ‘Judges 18:6.’ ” Neither of us knew what the verse said. The TNIV has “Go in peace. Your journey has the Lord’s approval”; the NRSV has “Go in peace. The mission you are on is under the eye of the Lord.” God had taken the verse entirely out of context, as God often does. Because God gave such assurances of involvement with us in this journey, I would say to people that I wasn’t worried about whether things would work out. It was God who was going to look stupid if they didn’t. (Things have worked out, and God doesn’t look stupid.)...