We are often so focused on our desired destinations in life that we miss the journey along the way. But our God isn’t just a God of arrivals and happy endings. He is interested in all the chapters of our lives.

The story of Jacob teaches us that anonymous places along our journey can become sites of surprising meaning. When we find him in Genesis 28, he is running from this family of origin and moving to Haran, where he hopes to find a wife and start a family of his own. But along the way, Jacob has a surprising God-encounter. It touches him so deeply that he calls that place Bethel, the “house of God”.

Perhaps you have not yet arrived at your desired destination in life. But the phase of transition where you are now can become the most special place of all: a place of encounter with God. Do not live on the faith of your youth or your dreams for the future. God has something new for you this year!

In Theology of Hope, Jürgen Moltmann writes:

“Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present... The believer is not set at the high noon of life, but at the dawn of a new day at the point where night and day, things passing and things to come, grapple with each other. Hence the believer does not simply take the day as it comes, but looks beyond the day to the things which according to the promise of him who is the creator ex nihilo and raiser of the dead are still to come.”¹

This means that we should treasure our current God-encounters but shouldn’t become so comfortable in the present that we miss our destinations. We learn this lesson from Jacob’s ancestors, for his great-grandfather had set out from Ur to Canaan, but had settled along the way. For some reason, he stopped halfway. His final destination was Canaan, but he settled and died in Haran (Genesis 11:31-32).

This means that Abraham’s famous journey toward Canaan had actually been started by his father.

Abraham honours his father’s goal while going beyond him and reaching the desired destination.

You may think you haven’t reached your goal yet and consider your current moment just a place of passage. But any random place can become a personal Bethel. And our God-encounters help us not to settle, but propel us forward.

René Breuel, evangelical pastor, author in Rome. 

Notes

¹ Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: For the 21^st Century (London: SCM Press, 2021), 2, 16. 

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