On The Road Again -- Inktober 10 #nomadic

 
We moved a lot while our girls were growing up.  Our family was more like a nomadic tribe, transferring to a strange land for a few years and moving on to the next.  A friend once confided to me that I had totally messed up her address book with all our changes of residence.

My husband and I are now in our tenth location.  Many times I thought that surely this move or that would be the last. But God freed me from that myth a few moves ago.  My final destination is heaven. Anything in between, well, is just a rest area on the highway.

Years ago and just about every move between, God used a particular verse to change my heart and my mindset.

Not that I complain of want,
for I have learned,
in whatever state I am,
               to be content.

                 Philippians 4. 11

I chuckle, because written in the margin now some 40 years and nine moves ago, I had scribbled "even Tennessee."  At the time, I was a young lonely mom from Chicago with a two year old and a newborn in the Deep South in a house surrounded by cotton fields.  It was our first major move.  And I felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

Little did I know, not just the hardships yet to come, but the extreme joys, the deepening of our lives in Christ, over all those many moves and all those new places.  God taught me quite literally "in whatever state I am," to learn His secret of contentment.

Because whether it was Tennessee or Illinois or Ohio or Kansas or Iowa, I could dwell in Him.  He has strategically appointed me in that exact house, that particular block, that specific neighborhood, that city for deeper purposes than I will ever know, for His glory.

...the place where the LORD will choose, to make His name dwell there.  Deuteronomy 16.2 

And through the years with each bend in the road and huge changes, God brought me to observe that I have seen too much to question God in this.

The amusing part of "even Tennessee" is that's where we live now, our third location in that same state.

Contentment is not a secret joy,
      nor dependent on situation or location.
It is a learned state of heart
    that not just prevails over circumstances
but flourishes in them.

God's deliverance may not be in plucking us out of a difficult spot in life, but engraving His joy into our hearts in whatever state we are.

When I look back
on all those places now,
    there is not one
    that I would have wanted to miss.