Tom and I traveled a lot last year.  If you include the miles to and from Hawaii, we traveled close to 25,000 miles in 2017.  I just finished reading the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis.  Abraham traveled a lot of miles for a person in his day.  I found this neat chart that suggests that Abraham traveled over 2000 miles to find the place he could call home.  But Abraham discovered – and I have always known – that wherever we go, God is there.

Abraham was the father of Judaism.  God called him and Abraham went.  God talked to him and told him what do to and Abraham followed.  Abraham traveled from Ur to Haran to Bethel to Egypt and back again, finally settling in Hebron.  To say that Abraham was nomadic is an understatement!  None of the people Abraham knew traveled the way he did.  And none of them followed God with Abraham’s faithfulness.  Abraham discovered that God was not a local custom, but the omnipresent Creator of all.

Do we need to travel to follow God?  Of course not!  You can stay in the same town all your life and still be a faithful servant of God.  But the Bible is full of stories of people who left the familiar and went out into the unknown to follow the call of God.  Abraham, Joseph, Peter, and Paul are just a few examples.  All of them followed God to new places because they heard the call of God in their lives.  All of them discovered that wherever we go, God is there.

Where has God led you?  What kind of journeys have you been on?  Sometimes our miles are journeys of the heart or challenges of the body.  Has God led you from addiction to sobriety?  From illness to health?  Through the valley of the shadow of death?  In these journeys, too, God is there.

How many miles will you travel in 2018?  Will they be miles you can measure on an odometer or miles of faithfulness where every step is a step in God’s will?  As we faithfully follow, we learn this lesson more clearly every day.  Wherever we go, God is there.