Faith

Sitting here in a motel room in small-town Arkansas, it really hits home that I am potentially about to enter a drastically different world from the world I know. A good world, in some ways, but very very different.

On the way here, parked by the side of a rural state road somewhere between you've-never-heard-of-it and the village of you-don't-know-it, I got out of the car and got presented with... absolute and total silence. Like I have never experienced. There was absolute nothing. No bird cheeped, no insect buzzed, no engine ran. No wind. My tinnitus, which is normally not very noticeable, was the absolute only sound I heard.

In the world I know, if I want a pack of smokes or a 3 Musketeers bar at 3 am, I can have one in my hand within minutes. If I want them at 3:45 AM Christmas Morning, I can have them. Here, unless you want something between 9 and 5, you may be out of luck and you might have to drive 45 minutes to get that.

At home I have high-speed cable internet suitable for gaming. In this motel room, I have internet of some sort available wirelessly. Where I will be living, Lord only knows.

I have high confidence that I am doing the right thing. There are signs that this is what G-d wills. Doesn't mean I ain't skeered. ;) Moving to a rural farm is going to be a drastic departure from my life as usual.

In the Tanakh, what Christians call the Old Testament, there are innumerable examples where G-d tells a prophet that the people need to do this very hard thing, and the prophet tells the people, "Go, slay 10,000 philistines with a soft bristle brush. GO. DO IT NAO.

NAO. GO NAO. DO IT.

And you know that the people who hear this must be like, "well F0C% my soul right now." But you HAVE to do it. Because you know the story about the scouts who went to scout the Amalekites and peed their pants in fear, and because that the Israelites wandered an extra 40 years in the desert. And that is no bueno. You don't want to be in the desert, you want to be living out the promise. You want to be living out the providence. Not moping around until you die because you were chicken s***.

But faith don't mean you ain't skeered. It means you skeered and you do it anyway. Because He said. Because He promised you the land if you were faithful. In the case of the Israelites and hopefully myself too.

But honestly I know I could never live with myself if I chickened out. I've wanted this pretty much my whole life. Now I need to get it.