We Always Say We Will Go Somewhere

You have had this conversation eleven times.

Somebody says we should go away. Or we should take them somewhere. Or we never do anything, do we. And everybody agrees, and there is real warmth in the agreeing, and somebody says a place, and for about four minutes it is a plan.

And then it is Tuesday again.

Let me say something before anything else, because I suspect there is a braced feeling in you as you read. This is not laziness and this is not a family who does not care. Every one of those eleven conversations was sincere. It was meant every time.

What is missing is not the wanting and it is not the effort. It is a date.

A trip with no date is not a plan. It is a mood. It lives in the pleasant conditional, and the pleasant conditional is a comfortable place to live, which is exactly why it survives eleven conversations. Nothing in it can fail. Nothing has to be arranged. Nobody has to find out what it would cost or whether it would work.

The moment a date goes down, the mood becomes a thing, and a thing can go wrong. That is what has been avoided in this house, and I do not think anybody knew that is what was being avoided.

So Abram departed

There is a sentence at the beginning of the most famous journey in the Bible, and the remarkable thing about it is how ordinary it is.

So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. (Genesis 12:4, King James Version)

So Abram departed.

That is the entire account of the beginning. No preparation is described. There is no list of what was packed, no route, no scene where everybody talks it over and agrees it is a good idea in principle.

He departed. One verb, past tense, and the whole rest of the story sits on the far side of it.

You are not too late to depart, and the years behind this family have never once closed the road in front of it. Genesis 12:4 records the departing as one plain verb and puts a man of seventy five on the other side of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a line like that specific to a household that has been saying it for years.

Notice the age, because it is doing work. Seventy five. This is not a young man with everything ahead of him and nothing settled yet. This is somebody with a whole established life, at the age where most people have quietly decided their arrangements are final.

And nothing in the text treats the years in Haran as wasted, or as evidence about him. They are simply where he was before he went.

You have not been disqualified by the waiting, and no year of this has ever once been counted against you. The written word names the departing and then names the age, and never once names a reason for the delay, and the Spirit of God is the one who lifts the weight of that off a parent reading it.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a piece like this usually turns into a scolding with a Bible verse on it. That is not what is happening. Nobody is being told to be more decisive.

The date is the whole thing

Here is the practical claim of this article, and it is the only one.

The date is not the small administrative part that comes after the real decision. The date is the trip.

Everything that has felt like the hard part, where to go, what it costs, whether it would even be any good, is downstream of it. None of those questions can be answered while the plan is a mood, because there is nothing concrete to answer them about. All of them become answerable, or at least askable, the moment there is a day with something written on it.

You are able to put a date down before a single other thing is decided, and it has never once needed a plan behind it to be real. It is written in Genesis that the departing came first and the preparation is not described at all, and His Spirit is what makes a pen in a hand at a kitchen wall feel like obedience rather than optimism.

Because once it is on the calendar the conversations change shape. Instead of should we go somewhere, which nobody can act on, it becomes what shall we do on the fourteenth, which anybody in the house can.

And it does not have to be a good date. It does not have to be far, it does not have to be a vacation, and none of it has to be settled. A Saturday five weeks out with the word out written on it changes the category of the thing entirely.

You were never asked to produce a whole week away in order to be a family that goes places, and one day has never once been a smaller version of the same thing. The Spirit of God is the one who is present at an ordinary calendar on an ordinary evening, and Genesis 12:4 gives the going a single verb rather than a size.

One date, this week, small

So here is the assignment, and it is smaller than it sounds.

Put one date in the calendar this week.

Where the household can see it. On the wall, on the fridge, wherever people in this house actually look. Not in your own head, and not in a private note on your phone where nobody else will meet it.

You are able to write one day on a wall, and that has never once required the whole thing to be worked out first. Genesis 12:4 puts the going before the detail and calls it done in one word, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing with somebody at a calendar with a pen in their hand.

And keep it small. Genuinely small. A Saturday, or half of one. If the first date that goes down is a week somewhere expensive, a mood has been turned into a bigger mood and it will not survive contact with February.

Then leave it alone. Nothing else has to be decided this week. The date does its own work from there, because a family who can see a day starts talking about it without being asked to.

You have a household that will begin talking about a day it can see, and that has never once depended on you selling it to anybody. Genesis 12:4 names the departing and leaves every arrangement unrecorded, and the same Spirit who moved a man out of Haran is at work in a kitchen where somebody has just picked up a pen.