By nature, humans tend towards that which is familiar whether we fully realize it or not.  That’s not all bad, except when it comes to making necessary or significant life changes. The familiar can be the very thing that holds us back if we allow it to.

I think a lot about this because I’m always interested in change dynamics, but also because our family is in a season of change and transition and I experience first hand every day how real the tendency to run back to safety is.

One of my favorite passages in scripture comes from Genesis 13:17. The story is that of the Isrealites leaving Egypt, their long term place of captivity and oppression, in destination for a better life and place that God had for them.  But it meant traveling in unfamiliar, even treacherous, territory.

It so happened that after Pharaoh released the people, God didn’t lead them by the road through the land of the Philistines, which was the shortest route, for God thought, “If the people encounter war, they’ll change their minds and go back to Egypt.”

So here they are:  the Israelites have just been freed from Egypt, the very thing they’ve longed for and desired and yet God sees that even though this is the very thing they’ve cried out for for years, their natural tendency, especially faced with difficulty, would be to turn right back to where they began.

Why?  Because even though it wasn’t the promised land, it was a safe place.  It was familiar.  Known.  Predictable.  Moving towards a better future is always scary simply because there are unknowns.

God intervenes and leads the Israelites on a path, while not the shortest and most direct, but a path that would enable them to walk into the promises that God had set before them. You know what this tells me?

God enables and empowers us to come into our destiny.  God wants to assure our success in following His guidance into our best possible future.

This is super encouraging. As much as I might like to think I’m not bound to the familiar, I do believe there is a gravitational pull towards familiarity especially when trying to navigate through the uncertainty of change.  It’s always easier to return to the safe place of what is familiar than to navigate into an unknown future.

Change is difficult. Yet, when God calls us out and moves us out, we have to become free from that which we’ve known to move more fully into our destiny.  We have to let go of the old to experience the new.  You can’t have it both ways. Fortunately, we serve a God who is bigger than our human tendencies and if we listen and follow, he will lead us along the right path- maybe not the shortest- that will eventually bring us into all that He has for us.

That’s something that in the midst of change and uncertainly we can put our hope and trust in.