Aug. 2, 2026 - The Quest: Leaving Home

Can I tell you about the moment I love most in any trip? It's not the destination. It's not even the drive. It's the second right before you leave — suitcase by the door, coffee still warm in your hand, house gone quiet around you. You check your pockets one more time even though you already checked them twice. And then you hear it: the click of the deadbolt behind you. Something shifts right there. The whole world looks different the second you step off your own porch.

If you've ever traveled, you know exactly what I mean. The smell of something cooking from a restaurant you'll never find again. Streets worn smooth by feet that walked there long before yours did. Ocean air. Mountain air. Dust kicked up off a county road. Travel has a way of waking us up. It gives us new eyes.

But here's what I want to sit with for a minute: you do not have to get on a plane for that to happen to you. That wide-open, wondering way of seeing the world — where the ordinary suddenly looks extraordinary — isn't reserved for people with a passport stamp. It's available to you right where you are. It's a choice. And it turns out, it's one of the oldest invitations God has ever offered.

Think about it — Scripture is full of people who were called to leave. The first thing God ever says to Abraham is go. Moses gets sent to walk an entire people out of Egypt. Ruth leaves everything she's ever known and steps into a future she can't see the end of. The disciples put down their nets for a teacher who never seemed to stay put.

Over and over, God meets people exactly at the edge of what they know — and invites them one step further.

The story of the Israelites leaving Egypt might be the biggest journey story in the whole Bible. We remember the dramatic parts — the plagues, the sea splitting open, the manna falling from the sky. But before any of that, there was something quieter. There was a door. There was a decision. There were people who had to decide whether they trusted God enough to leave the only life they had ever known.

And what they knew was slavery.

That's the strange, deeply human part of leaving, isn't it? Even a painful place can start to feel like home. Later, out in the wilderness, the Israelites actually looked back and missed the food in Egypt. They missed the rhythm of it — even the rhythm of being enslaved. They wanted to turn around and go back to their own bondage.

I wonder if some of us know that feeling better than we'd like to admit. We hold onto old hurts, old grudges, old ways of seeing ourselves, not because any of it gives us life, but because it's familiar. Uncertainty can feel scarier than pain we already know by name. But God doesn't call us backward. God calls us forward.

Here's a line in Exodus 13 that's easy to read right past — and I think it might be one of the most important sentences in the whole story. When Pharaoh finally let the people go, God did not lead them by the short way. The road through Philistine territory was closer. God chose the long way instead, out through the wilderness.

God knew the shortcut was sitting right there. God chose not to take it.

Most of us are wired for the fastest route. We check the map, we compare our options, and we pick whatever shaves three minutes off the drive — even if it means missing the view. And here's God, on purpose, choosing the long road.

Why? Because God wasn't just trying to move people from point A to point B. God was forming them. The wilderness is where they learned to trust. It's where they found out God would show up for them one day at a time, not all at once. A group of people who had only ever known how to be slaves slowly became a people shaped by the presence of God.

The wilderness wasn't wasted time. It was exactly where God was.

A lot of us know what it's like to be on a wilderness road — not literally, but in that deeper way. A new chapter you didn't see coming. A long season of grief. A change you never would have chosen for yourself. A path ahead that looks nothing like the one you had planned.

In those moments, we end up asking the same question that opens Psalm 121 — where does my help come from, when I can't see what's ahead? And the psalmist doesn't answer with a map or an itinerary. The answer is simply this: help comes from God, the maker of heaven and earth.

The comfort of faith was never that we'd know every turn in the road ahead of time. The comfort of faith is that God walks with us through every one of those turns.

That's part of why Jesus spent so much of his life on the move. He met people on roads, on shorelines, at wells. He sat down at tables with strangers. He healed people in the middle of going somewhere else. Jesus understood that God finds us along the way — not at the finish line, but right in the middle of things.

So wherever you find yourself right now — standing at the start of something new, deep in a wilderness season, or just starting to sense God nudging you toward something you can't quite name yet — here's the invitation:

You don't need to see the whole road. You only need enough faith for the next step.

The God who led Israel through the wilderness is still leading. The God who walked dusty roads next to ordinary people is still walking. And sometimes the holiest thing any of us can do, siblings, is simply open the door and take that first step.

The quest of faith has always been a journey. And it's still going.