We Always Say We Will Go Somewhere

You have had this conversation eleven times.

Somebody says we should go away, or we should take them somewhere, or we never do anything. And everybody agrees. There is genuine warmth in it, and somebody says a place, and for about four minutes it is a real plan.

And then it is Tuesday again.

I want to be clear about something before anything else, because I suspect you are braced for it. This is not laziness and you are not a family who does not care. Every one of those eleven conversations was sincere. You meant it every time.

What is missing is not desire and it is not effort. It is a date.

Because a trip without a date is not a plan, it is a mood. It exists in the pleasant conditional. And the pleasant conditional is comfortable, which is exactly why it survives eleven conversations: nothing in it can fail, nothing has to be arranged, and nobody has to find out what it would actually cost or whether it would work.

The moment a date goes down, the mood becomes a thing, and a thing can be wrong. That is what you have been avoiding, and I do not think you knew that is what you were avoiding.

So Abram departed

There is a sentence at the start of the most famous journey in the Bible, and what is remarkable is how ordinary it is.

So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him; and Lot went with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. (Genesis 12:4, King James Version)

So Abram departed.

That is the whole account of the beginning. No preparation is described. There is no list of what was packed, no discussion of the route, no scene where everybody talks about it and agrees it is a good idea in principle.

He departed. It is one verb and it is in the past tense, and everything else in that story is on the far side of it.

And note the age, because it is doing work. Seventy five. This is not a young man with everything ahead of him and nothing settled. This is a person with a whole established life, at a point where most people have decided their arrangements are final.

He was not too late. Not at seventy five, and not after however many years in Haran where nothing had happened yet.

You are not too late to depart, and the years behind you have never once closed the road. Genesis 12:4 records the departing as one plain verb and puts a man of seventy five on the other side of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to a family who have been saying it for years.

The date is the whole thing

Here is the practical claim of this article, and it is the only one.

The date is not the small administrative part. The date is the trip.

Everything you have been treating as the hard part, where to go, what it costs, whether it will be any good, is downstream. None of those questions can be answered while the plan is a mood, because there is nothing concrete to answer them about. And all of them become easy, or at least possible, once there is a day with something written on it.

And it does not need to be a good date. It does not need to be far away, it does not need to be a holiday, and it does not need any of it settled. A Saturday in five weeks with the word out written on it is enough to change the category of the thing.

Because once it is on the calendar, the conversations change. Instead of should we go somewhere, which nobody can act on, it becomes what shall we do on the fourteenth, which anybody can.

You are able to put a date down before anything is decided, and it has never once needed a plan behind it to count. The written word puts the departing first and describes none of the preparation, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a family out of the conditional.

One date this week

So here is the assignment.

Put one date in the calendar this week, however small the plan.

Where you can see it. On the wall, or wherever your household actually looks. Not in your own head, and not in a private note.

And keep it small. Genuinely small. A Saturday. One day, or half of one. If the first date you put down is a week away somewhere expensive, you have made a mood into a bigger mood and it will not survive.

And then leave it alone. You do not have to decide anything else this week. The date sitting there does its own work, because a family who can see a date starts talking about it without being asked.

Genesis 12:4 has the departing recorded before any of the arrangements, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a family stops discussing and writes something down.

You are able to write one date on a wall, and it has never once required the whole thing to be worked out first. Genesis 12:4 puts the going before the detail and calls it done in a single verb, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody standing at a calendar with a pen.