How are you preparing for your journey with Jesus? Is it haphazard or intentional?
How do you prepare for a trip? Whether it's a vacation or a road trip, my least favorite part is packing. And one of my favorite moments is pulling out of the driveway with everything loaded up and grabbing a coffee for the journey. There's a sense of anticipation and excitement around leaving behind the normal routine for something fresh and different.
Here's what it looks like for us.
I love leaving early in the morning, which is ironic, because I almost always stay up too late the night before packing and making sure everything is set aside and ready to go. I try to get up right before the sun comes up and load everything up while taking some sips of coffee in between. Then we load up the kids and pull away from the house. The next step is two things – grabbing some breakfast sandwiches, some coffees, and filling up the gas tank. These are all of the steps we take for nearly every road trip we take – it's even part of what we look forward to when we are planning. Then we're on the road.
I think our journey with Jesus can have some similar cadence. Have you noticed there are mini-stories and journeys that we go in during our lifetimes that have a start and an end? There's typically some sort of lesson involved or a season that opens and closes. Sometimes it's a relationship, a job or career, or something that God is trying to teach over the course of time. Sometimes it's even an invitation from Him to step into something.
I wonder if sometimes in our relationship with God if we treat it more like a spontaneous trip down the road than we do a long journey. Maybe your relationship with God feels more like a quick trip to your local Target than it does a lengthy drive to another city. But what if we're missing something by not putting in more preparation and thought into our journey with Jesus?
When we go on a trip, we're thinking through all the things to make the trip successful – what to wear, what's the weather going to be like where we're going, do we have enough fuel to get to the next stop, are there snacks packed, do we need a towel, a pillow, or will it all be provided? Sometimes we even do maintenance on the vehicle a week or two in advance to try to ensure that we actually arrive at the destination.
If I just hopped in my car right now to head on a trip, I'd be missing some key things:
I don't have anything packed, there's only a quarter tank of gas, and I don't even know where I'm going.
In Luke 14:28 it says:
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?"
In your relationship with Jesus, what are you preparing for? Is your journey with Jesus haphazard, or is it planned and intentional? Where are you going? Has He invited you somewhere? How are you going to get there? To use the metaphor, are you trying to stretch the preparation for a trip to Target into a drive across the country?
Here's what preparation might look like:
My prayer for you is that you would prepare for the journey – I don't know what your journey will entail, but I hope that you engage the process and find ways to be ready for that so that when it's time to go, you're ready.