Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God; Let Your good Spirit lead me on level ground.  Psalms 143:10

God fathers each of His children differently. His path for me is a solitary one, and it will never perfectly mirror the path He chose for my parents. If my parents were iconic in their faith, trying to “measure up” to their story can feel suffocating and impossible. I am not either of them, nor am I meant to be.

Scripture itself reflects this. Isaac was told by God not to go down to Egypt during the famine; Egypt was off limits to him. Yet Isaac’s son, Jacob, was led by God into Egypt in his famine and told to settle there. The very place that was forbidden to the father became the place of provision for the son. Obedience did not look identical from one generation to the next. I imagine Jacob’s confusion at first ~ doing something so different from what his father had been told must have felt risky, even disloyal. And yet it was the will of God for him.

God stretched me out of my own family’s mold in my mid-forties. Some of my views on peripheral biblical issues began to differ from those of my father and the legalistic church that shaped my early faith. The conversations were tense. His disapproval cast a shadow over our relationship for a time. But as the years passed, he saw that God’s hand was on my life, and I learned to speak of my convictions with more grace and less defensiveness. Before he died, the Lord brought us beautifully onto the same page through some “end-of-life” mercies. I treasure that.

Through all of this, God’s message has grown clearer.  I am His children first, and members of my earthly family second. Egypt may be off-limits to my father and yet, in another season, be precisely where He sends me. The point is not to replicate anyone else’s obedience, but to respond to the voice of my own Shepherd.

He is a kind Father who leads deliberately, giving His children the courage to step away from “the way our family has always done it” when He asks. The relational fallout can make us second-guess the path, but the same grace that calls us also sustains us. His voice is sometimes wild and wonderfully peculiar. His way is often solitary. But any price we pay is more than repaid in the joy of walking in step with Him, and one day, in hearing Him say, “Well done.”

I long to be shaped by You, Father, by Your Word, Your Spirit, and no one else.  Amen.