You don’t belong here
I hate moving. I hate traipsing through other people's homes, mentally superimposing my belongings over theirs and rearranging the furniture, when looking for a place. I hate filling out the application forms and having real estate agents assess my worth in terms of dollars instead of integrity. I hate packing my belongings into boxes, wondering if they'll survive the trip. I hate hiring movers and having the moving company send me two guys instead of three and completely forgetting to mention the piano.
And even when the move is over, I hate discovering all the “quirks” I didn't know the new place had. (Where did a carpet burn that shape come from? What do you mean we can't get television reception here?) There's that period of adjusting to the new space—getting used to the man who smokes on his balcony downstairs or the woman who drops what sounds like ping pong balls on the floor upstairs; discovering, as the months roll on, that that fence, which you were assured would eventually be fixed so that people couldn't go tramping through your backyard, is giving the Tower of Pisa stiff competition in terms of its angle in relation to the ground (and, in fact, doesn't get fixed until the week you move out).
So lately, as my husband and I started talking about moving to extricate ourselves from a difficult situation, my heart sank and I felt sick just thinking of what we were going to subject ourselves to, once again.
Then I went to church and heard a sermon on Hebrews 11:
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. (v. 8-10)
Abraham was a rich man. He probably could have bought himself a nice plot of land with a good-sized field out the back for the camels back in Haran, but instead he chose to wander around in a place where he didn't belong—a place which had been promised to him but was actually owned but another. He spent his life living in tents—packing them up, moving around, stopping and pitching them again. The author of Hebrews tells us that Abraham was living by faith—living, not by what he could see, but by what he could not see. He was looking forward to living in the God—the city in the heavenly country.
Here we're in danger of being seduced into living by sight—repainting our walls, accumulating antique furniture, making sure our curtains match the lounges. We're convinced that Sydney is our home and we need to work hard to get those harbour views. But we don't belong here. We belong in our Father's house.
“In my Father's house are many rooms,” says Jesus (John 14:2) and I imagine them to be rooms without crusty floors and leaking bathrooms—rooms uninfested by mould spores or cockroaches who love scurrying in the cracks. Every day I am persuaded by the world to stop living by faith and keep living by sight. But, like Abraham, I desire a better country (Heb 11:16) where I will never have to move again.