Abraham and Sarah....

It's Saturday afternoon here. B and I spent the better part of the day so far, cleaning and sorting and burning paper... We sorted out our guest room, which has been a collecting space in recent months. B's brother, K, is coming for a visit in two weeks; a few days later B's parents arrive. We are all excited to share our space with people who love us.

There is a sense of a place being home when you get to introduce it to loved ones. I think that has been something very special about having had visits from family and friends over the course of the last six years or so.

But when I start sorting and weighing the worth of a picture or piece of paperI get hit with waves of nostalgia. The 'remember when's' roll in and over my thoughts and I struggle to part with bits. The odd thing is that the bits are not big items, pieces of letters I saved, addresses I torn off envelopes intending to write people who blessed me, paintings of indescribable things done by wee ones, post cards I forgot to mail, photos (a whole box) from before we went digital.

I have to do this kind of purging in small steps. I often start of willing to toss it all and then become less effective as the hours pass. So some headway was made today; the progress was probably due to the fact that over a cup of coffee B and I started the day talking about the future.

More often then not the future is blank...really blank... As we looked back over the past ten years or so it becam very apparent that we could never have planned to be where we are at this moment. And we are happy to be here. But there is a very clear sense of it being time to end our current work. There are several ideas sitting in the wings for future work; however none of those ideas are anything we have the capacity to make happen. They are things we want to do, things that we have a passion for, but things that require resources outside of what we currently possess...

As we chatted, B reminded me of Abraham and Sarah. He said it's like leaving Ur. But we have already left Ur... and now it's time to leave Haran. That was Abraham's stop after Ur. But the rest of the story is about a couple who wandered until they died.

In fact, they were even buried on foreign soil. Now, that's an end we are happy to embrace. We have already decided that where we drop there we lie. Now I am mulling over the thought that where I will lie after death might be a place that I have never even seen yet.

So we are looking around trying to decide what do we sell, store, give, take... I know that the sooner we get these things sorted out the easier our last six months will be. But I was thinking of course our desire to return will be fulfilled in the near future... but B is right, we can't be sure. If the past is any indication of our future journey, then anything, anything at all is possible.

So we are looking at the future as if we are Abraham and Sarah...God will lead and we will follow. And I need to trust...