Abraham on the Unfamiliar Way

Remind yourself, when you wake to a strangeness
of foreign lights through blowing trees
out the window of yet another hotel,
that home is only where you pretend you’re from.
What’s familiar sends you packing,
watching for “some lost place called home.”
You’re from wherever you go.

Rod Jellema

One morning you wake to a world that is unfamiliar. Suddenly you’re an alien. Rod Jellema captures this sense of unfamiliarity in his poem “Travel Advisory.” He starts out in a foreign hotel, among foreign people and the sense of strangeness we feel. He ends by reminding us that when we return, we are still not home.

you’re a citizen of never was a place.

Remember not to feel too much at home.

Abraham leaves Ur and never returns home.

He is searching for a city “whose designer and builder is God.” He dies en route. Abraham’s life is a sojourn through the unfamiliar.

Being in an unfamiliar place is uncomfortable. In the “Journey of the Magi,” T.S. Eliot’s wise man returns home from the nativity and encounters an “alien people clutching their alien gods.”

In an unfamiliar place, we may hear similar sounds and see similar sights, but we know we are not at home. Maybe the language is different. Maybe the customs are different. The roads are surely different.

All the familiar markers are gone. Unfamiliar places can be the ground of adventure, but they can also be the ground of disorientation. We may get lost. We may loose our sense of direction.

We may lose control.

When we step off the plane, we may step into an alien city. Then again, we may step into an alien city in our own hometown. A job loss, a job gain, a marriage, a divorce. One change ripples through our world, and suddenly the familiar haunts grow unfamiliar. We are lost.

In the land of the unfamiliar, our sense of control slips away. We may battle loneliness, a sense of isolation, even a sense of loss. Suddenly, we realize our vulnerability. Life is tenuous. We are so very thin.

God calls Abraham into a lifelong journey across an unfamiliar way.

We walk the same path. In Christ, we know the way, the truth and the life. And yet, we see so dimly. Our Savior saves us from ourselves by calling us into the way of trust and out of the way of control.

Our methods, systems, paradigms fall before the Lord of glory.

In this place of letting go, in this place of self-abandonment, in this place of unfamiliarity, we discover.

We discover the strangeness of grace. The odd refractions of God’s love, enclosing, surrounding, sustaining us.

We gain new eyes to see the world afresh. What seemed like security was slavery. What seemed like love was control. What seemed like success was a momentary glimmer of a fading star.

In the place of unfamiliarity, we become children again.

We learn new words.

We sing new songs.

We play new games.

Unfamiliarity may become a garden of innovation and creativity.

Abraham leaves the land Ur and gives birth to a new race, a new people, a new world. Thomas Cahill suggest that Abraham is the father of the Western world. Time and space  as we know change because Abraham walks away from the never-ending cycles of Ur and enters into a world of possibility, of newness, of a real future full of surprise.

If you woke up today and suddenly everything seemed unfamiliar. Don’t panic. The Lord of surprise may have called you out of comfort into a whole new world of possibility.

to be continued.