The swifts are leaving English skies. It’s a herald, a loss. The days may still be warm but brown leaves begin to scatter the parks. These are signs of an end, a folding of one season into another.
Our days are numbered.
After a long journey (God speaks, we are slower to listen than we’d care to admit…. God leads, his timing is slower than we’d like), we are on the verge of booking flights and accommodation as we move from the UK to North Africa.
We are on the countdown. There’s a looming limit to the morning routine I’ve carved out. I’m starting to think about spice mixes in the cupboard and what we’ll use up. Estate agents call too frequently, telling us to start thinking of our home as a business; I want it to be sanctuary for someone, even if it’s not me. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ll see certain friends, beloved friends, before we move.
Our days are numbered. I’m not wholly sold on John Piper’s definitions of mission and worship – that mission happens because the worship doesn’t. The time we’ve spent preparing for this move, metaphorically sitting at the feet of others around the world, has made this dogmatic soul a little less so. I’ve become resistant to anything that feels too dichotomous, setting up two things as opposite to each other. Worship and mission both feel to me like telling stories about Jesus, with Jesus, for the glory of Jesus. They will look different in this life compared to the next, but they both seem like the work that we were made for. Part of God’s big ongoing story, the one He started, that He secured at the cross, and that He is weaving into eternity. That’s a story I can get excited about being a small part of.
Stories are made up of moments, chapters, twists in the plot. Today is another milestone: my husband’s last day of work. A job he dreamt of but that it’s right to stop now to enable this next move. We state the obvious to each other: we are going all in. We pull on the encouragement of Matthew 19:29:
“everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”
This is the inheritance we’re told to expect: alongside persecution and suffering, there’s a hundredfold what we left and eternity. Promises for this life and the next. That’s an inheritance worth going all in for; one that’s only uncovered together.
Resistant to dichotomies as I am, I recognise that there are things that will only take this particular shape in this life. As we prepare to go, we will lose some things for a while, but gain others. I will no longer pray in person with a group of friends every Monday. I won’t sip my morning coffee looking out over these hills. Experienced people tell us that we’re likely to miss communal worship most of all. But, we are anticipating the new friendships that will form. God has given us hints of the people we will meet. He has reminded us that – being new and naive in that space – we will need help; being willing to accept it is part of our welcome. And that it’s only in this life that we will host those who don’t know the name and person of Jesus.
It’s a strange season. We have good community around us. And we are learning to walk out what it is to do this together. That their involvement is different to ours. It’s a part of their calling; for us, it’s our whole life.
We are now able to count the number of times that we’ll see people before we leave on our hands (with fingers to spare). Two things co-exist: the cost of leaving and the joy of going. The anticipation of the people we will meet, thresholds we will cross, stories we will hear. I am reading a book about strangers. I think about the bizarre and basic reality that all these friends who I will hug goodbye were strangers once – some 20 years ago, some five, some less than one… Our days here are numbered, but so are our days there. We’re just less aware of that countdown.
God has spoken so we’re off to encounter our inheritance.
This year, we get to follow the swifts south.
Our days are numbered.
Time to pack a bag.
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