When I was a pastor in Arkansas, I lived two blocks from the church.  Don’t think I haven’t sometimes missed that!  Siloam Springs’ First Baptist was a wonderful experience.  Wonderful people.  Some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.  Low pressure.  Easy pace.  The only downside to living in Northwest Arkansas was that, because of the prevalence of the poultry industry, some eighty-million tons of chicken litter per year was processed within a few square miles of where we lived.  Depending on the wind, well, you get my drift. 

The office hours were eight-thirty to five but, quite honestly, most days it was difficult to fill all those hours with meaningful activities.  I have memories of sitting at my desk wondering what I should do next.  I actually remember feeling guilty for getting paid sometimes.  (An experience I have yet to have here).  And, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if my life had turned right instead of left, or, up instead of down.  I’m certain I’d still be there.  I’m also quite certain that, on more than one occasion, if given the opportunity, I’d have gladly gone back.  In so very many ways, Siloam Springs was a safe and comfortable place.  I’ve often wondered if that was at least part of the reason God’s hand might have well been in the move I made from what was safe to what, at times, scared me nearly to death after I left there. 

Five years that I can only describe as a personal and professional wilderness.  Five years of financial struggle the likes of which I would not wish on my worst enemy.  Five years of almost debilitating uncertainty about my future.  And, just as bad, five years of what was, for me, a ministerial wilderness.  Very few opportunities to preach.  Lots of time sitting at an envious distance and only watching other people do what I was still certain was my life’s calling but what I was, because of my life’s situation, unable to do.  When reading Joel Gregory’s testimony of what he has learned in his ministerial wilderness since leaving First Baptist, Dallas, several years ago, I can identify immediately with him when he said that, until he moved from the pulpit to the pew, he never realized how difficult it was for the average person to just get through life.  Many, many times, I found myself longing to go back to where it was safe and comfortable. 

It’s so terribly easy to spend the better part of life’s energy looking for ways to nest in comfortable and safe places.  The call of God, however, is often to move out into unknown wildernesses of unpredictability.  Over and over again that proves to be his pattern in scripture and, as many of us could testify, in our personal experiences.  It seems that there is something God needs for us to learn that we only can learn from the perspective of those kinds of places.  The very same things God wanted Moses to tell the people of Israel to remember.  Three months they are now into their journey from slavery to the land God had only promised to show them.  But, they weren’t there yet.  They were somewhere in between.  And, it was going to get harder before it ever got easy.  Lots of time not knowing, from one day to the next, exactly where the next meal would come from and lots of time living with debilitating uncertainty about what the future held for family and faith alike.

Already, they had fallen into that all too familiar trap of sentimentalizing the past.  Just a few weeks before, they had complained to Moses, “’If we only had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’”  (Exodus 16:3)  Do you hear what they are saying?  Though God sent them a leader, in the person of Moses, willing to get in Pharaoh’s face and agitate successfully for their freedom and though God had slain the Egyptian army that chased them into the desert and even though God had parted the waters to make their passage to safety possible, when they got scared and hungry they got sentimental.  Here they are saying, “even if it was slavery, at least it was predictable and comfortable and we had enough to eat.”  There is nothing more tragic than a person who has surrendered his one chance at freedom to serve the false god of personal security. 

But, who among us hasn’t, at one time or another?  It’s amazing what price people we will pay to stay safe even when we feel called to something more significant.  It’s tragic, too.  Some will stay in a job that chokes their integrity and creativity to death because, as bad as it is, at least the medical benefits are good and the paycheck comes every two weeks.  Some women have been known to stay in abusive marriages until their husbands murder them because, as bad as it is, at least it’s predictable. 

So, here are the children of Israel wishing they could go back to what, though it was slavery, was at least predictable and comfortable.  Yet, God keeps calling them on to something else.  Any chance God is doing the same in your life?  In our church?  Not much has changed.  The geography and the technology may be different.  But, the interaction of the passion for personal security with the agitating Spirit of God that always keeps calling forward is still the undercurrent of most of what makes for what is going on in our lives and our church.  This ancient story of God’s dealings with Israel’s people is the prototype for what God is up to in the New Testament church and even in this very church.  God calling his people to a place they haven’t yet seen and discovering his ever-unfolding purposes for us in the future based on a willingness to believe that, at a minimum, God is consistent.  God tells Moses to remind the people, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.”  God’s history with his people is the story of one event after another in which he proves his consistent trustworthiness.  God, who has never failed his children in the past, will not fail them in the future. 

One of the greatest gifts parents can give their children is an appreciation for their spiritual history.  What God has done in the past becomes a point of reference as they sail the uncharted waters of the future.  If you don’t have that point of reference you’re always a little lost.  Steve Camp was recently trying to explain to his son Scott and to Russell Peterson who Stevie Nicks was.  Now, just in case you don’t know, Stevie Nicks, of Fleetwood Mac fame, was a rock star of the seventies.  But, as familiar as the name Stevie Nicks is to those of us born, let’s say, pre-seventies, her name means nothing to someone born in the eighties.  So, in order to explain the significance of Stevie Nicks to rock music in the eighties to Scott and Russell, Steve said that Stevie Nicks was the “Madonna” of the seventies.  Scott said, “who’s Madonna?”  As hard as it is to believe, to someone born when she was just becoming famous, Madonna is a poor point of reference.  So, looking for someone even more relevant, Scott then said, “O.K.  Stevie Nicks was the Christina Aguillera of the seventies.”  That made to sense to them.  But, not to me.  I wouldn’t know Christina Aguillera if she walked into this room right now.  I guess it has all has to do with your point of reference. 

Scattered all across the pages of our spiritual histories are points of reference for God’s faithfulness.  They are different for all of us.  But, the one thing they have in common is that they are the hard evidence that, when God makes a promise, he keeps it.  And, one promise God faithfully keeps is that he will never abandon those whom he calls.  Just as he did not abandon his son to the grave, he calls us to live as people confident that he will, in time, resurrect all who trust him even if they die following him.  In a more relevant vernacular, as our loving Father, he’ll never leave us hanging. 

For some, though, that’s why Father’s Day can be difficult.  Though many have warm and loving memories of strong fathers, trying to explain to others who don’t have those memories that God is like a loving father is like to trying to say Stevie Nicks is like Madonna.  It’s a confusing point of reference.  The sad and painful memory of some is of fathers who left them hanging when they were most vulnerable.  But, more and more, our culture is awakening to the fact that fathers are not second-string parents.  Everywhere you turn you can see fathers taking a more active role in the lives of their children.  Even in cases of divorce, the courts are recognizing more and more the importance of protecting the relationship between child and father because, without it, children become adults who forever lack that unique point of reference that only a father brings to the family.  Famous movie actresses may be trying to give us a new model of family that relegates the father to nothing more than the role of sperm donor.  But, within every one of us there is a longing for a relationship with both parents as active participants and sources of strength.  There is something about having that in our past that enables us for the future as nothing else can. 

So, God tells Moses, “remind the children that their Heavenly Father is consistently trustworthy.  I delivered them from slavery.  I’ve protected them all along.  Even if they fall, I will bear them up on ‘eagles’ wings.’”  It’s God’s way of rehearsing his faithful history with his children so they will remember that they can never go anywhere in all of creation as they follow the call of God on their lives that they will be out the realm of God’s loving protection. 

Remember, this is the in-between time for the children of Israel.  They aren’t still slaves but they aren’t home yet, either.  Sound familiar?  Not where we once were but not where we need to be, yet, either.  Just in between.  And, just reminded, that God’s place for us in the past is not a place to which we should journey in sentimental retreat.  It’s only a point of reference for us that, the God who consistently calls is consistently faithful.  He won’t leave us hanging.  As Moses said in a song he wrote just before he died, “Give ear, O heavens, and . . . ascribe greatness to our God.  The Rock, his work is perfect, and all his ways are just.  A faithful God, without deceit, just and upright is he.  He sustained (us) in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste; he shielded (us), cared for (us) guarded (us) as the apple of his eye.  As an eagle stirs up his nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads it wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions, the Lord alone guided (us).”  (Deuteronomy 32:1-12, parentheses mine)

The call of Christ on his church is, as the apostle Paul said, to always be, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.”  (Philippians 3:13)  If we remember the past at all it should be only as a point of reference that, the loving and faithful Father who has sustained us in the past has something new for us to do.  Something that lies ahead.  Something we’ll never see unless we trust him to be in the future what he has always been.