September 21st

Where you Settle is Where you die

            Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran.

Genesis 11:31-32

             A case can be made that Abraham was not the first person called by God to be the father of His people.  Abraham’s father was named Terah.  He uprooted his family in a time when people did not move much.  They left their homeland and travelled south to Canaan, just where God took Abraham decades later.  Somewhere around the midway point, the small party came across the community of Haran and settled there.

            Maybe someone was sick or injured and needed to rest.  Maybe Terah found an attractive woman to be his new bride.  Maybe they looked at the land and could not imagine anything better.  Maybe they were just tired of travelling.  Whatever the reason, they stopped in Haran, probably with the intention of heading out again sometime in the future.  That time never came.  Terah never set a single foot in the promised land.  Abraham became the father of nations and the patriarch of the faith.  Terah simply became a footnote in his son’s life and he was likely the one who first received God’s call.

            Where we settle is where we die.  The place where we stop in our journey is usually as far as we will make it.  That is true of our faith.  That is true of our jobs.  That is true of our marriages.  That is true of our parenting.  Inertia is a powerful force.  An object at rest, especially one who is tired, tends to stay at rest.  Some of my most productive time each day is the hour right after I get home from work.  I take out the garbage and play games with the kids and make dinner and do some dishes.  I know that once I sit down, once I relax and unwind from my day, I am not moving again until I stagger to bed.

            It is incredibly easy to settle with your spouse when you have kids who demand your attention and focus.  My conversations with my wife can simply be updates on who is in what crisis tonight and a calendar consultation for what we have tomorrow.  Then she can slip into her routine and I can slip into mine and then we barely see each other because our sleep schedules are so different.  If we settle there, if we say that this is as good as it gets and why try for anything more, the relationship dies.  That can happen to our relationship with our spouse.  That can happen to our relationship with our kids.  That can happen to our relationship with God.  People settle because they are tired of the journey and it is hard to start trying again.

            Terah has served as a warning to me for years.  Where we settle is where we die.  Do not allow your most important relationships to become afterthoughts for they can disappear when we stop investing in them.

           

A moment to reflect:

Where are you tempted to settle and stop trying?