06/03/2026
This Wednesday, June 3, I will conclude From Egypt to Canaan, a teaching journey that has occupied 102 weeks. Looking back over those lessons, one truth rises above all the others. Whether it is the core message of the study or simply the lesson that has most profoundly shaped me, I will leave others to decide. But it is the truth that remains with me.
Exodus is all about EXODUS
Life, it seems to me, is a long succession of exoduses.
We spend much of our lives imagining that arrival is the goal. We finally reach the place for which we have labored, prayed, hoped, and waited. We unpack our belongings. We drive the tent pegs deep. We learn the paths, the landmarks, the familiar sounds of home. What was once new becomes ordinary. What was once a destination becomes an address.
And then the cloud moves.
Without warning, the summons comes again.
The tents are folded. The campfires grow cold. We gather what we can carry and set our faces toward a horizon we do not yet understand.
The older I become, the more I suspect that life is not a journey from one destination to another, but a continual invitation into deeper and deeper exodus. Not merely geographical exodus, but inward exodus—the leaving behind of former certainties, former understandings, former versions of ourselves.
The hardest departures are rarely physical.
Changing an address is one thing. Changing a mind is another.
The landscapes of the heart are not easily crossed. We become attached to our conclusions, our opinions, our carefully constructed systems of belief. We build houses from them. We decorate the rooms. We imagine we will live there forever.
Yet life has a way of knocking on the door and whispering, "It is time to move on."
At this season of my life, I hold my theology with gentler hands than I once did. Not because I believe less, but because I have traveled farther. The doctrines that once seemed immovable have, over the years, been stretched, refined, dismantled, and rebuilt. Some have disappeared altogether. Others have emerged stronger for having survived the journey.
Everything alive is changing.
The trees know it. The rivers know it. The seasons preach it without words. Even my aging body bears daily witness to the truth that growth and change are inseparable companions.
As I sit in the evening of my years and look back across the landscape of my journey, I see exodus everywhere. Some departures arrived like earthquakes, reshaping entire continents of my life. Others came quietly, like a tide slipping out in the night, leaving the shoreline forever altered by morning.
Again and again I have been brought out in order to be brought in.
And perhaps that is the secret hidden within the story all along: we were never meant to build permanent homes in our present understanding. We were made for pilgrimage. Made for horizons. Made for the holy rhythm of leaving and arriving, losing and finding, dying and becoming.
The cloud moves.
And so, by grace, do we.
Exodus is not any particular change. Exodus is a way of life.
