This is one of my favorite verses and one I have been thinking about a lot over the past few days. Maybe it's because we celebrated our anniversary, one of the milestones of life that leads me to a time of reflection, of looking back and looking forward. Maybe it has to do with marking another year without any parents. I think of them often, but especially on anniversaries.....their birthdays, their wedding anniversary, the anniversaries of their passing from this life to the next. Maybe it has to do with having all the family around over the weekend......both sons and their families, my brother and sister-in-law, my nieces and their husbands, my great niece.....all of us together, which is a rare occasion indeed.
Life has certainly been different for my sons than it was for me. I lived my entire life on the same street. We moved once, when I was two years old, to the house where my parents lived out the rest of their lives. It was next door to the house where I spent my first two years. I grew up in a small town where everybody knew everybody. After I went to college (in a town about two hours away), I returned home for about a month and then got married. Al and I lived in the town where he grew up, just a few miles from his parents, for the first twelve years of our marriage. And then life changed!
In the years since, we have moved a lot. A LOT!! And that's where Hebrews 12 becomes part of the picture. This is not the life we had imagined. We never dreamed of living in so many different parts of the country, of meeting so many people, of traveling to so many places. But this is the path God has laid before us, and so we are doing our best to follow that path, to "run with endurance".
It hasn't always been easy. It's hard to pull up stakes and move so often. It's hard to leave friends behind. It's hard sometimes to make new ones. And that seems to get more difficult as we get older. It hasn't been easy for us, and I'm sure it wasn't easy for our sons. While we have all had some wonderful experiences that we would never otherwise have had, we have all had our share of less-than-wonderful experiences as well. Al and I have always been aware of how hard it was for our boys, and have done our best to smooth the bumps in the road for them. I'm not sure they have understood that. One of them in particular seems to have greater resentment about the life we have lived than the other.......you know who you are!.......with apparently less-than-fond memories of the "transient" life we have lived (that's his word, not mine! He has also described it as being "tossed from pillar to post", which makes him sound like an unwanted foster child, if you ask me! Nothing could be farther from the truth! Unfortunately, it's the "elephant in the room" that we never talk about!).
I suppose that instead of moving around so much, we could have stayed in one place with no job and no means of support. I doubt that any of us would have liked that so much! So we have followed the job, gone where employment led us, and done our best to live for Jesus wherever He led. We're still doing that......doing our best to live for Jesus, to run our race (not somebody else's) with endurance. Even after all these years, it isn't always easy. But it is so worth it!
It may be thro' the shadows dim, or o'er the stormy sea,
I take my cross and follow Him, wherever He leadeth me.
My heart, my life, my all I bring to Christ who loves me so;
He is my Master, Lord, and King; wherever He leads, I'll go.
Wherever He leads I'll go; wherever He leads, I'll go;
I'll follow my Christ who loves me so; wherever He leads, I'll go.
-B. B. McKinney
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