“He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house.” Hebrews 3:2. 

Last week, I took a road trip to a writer’s conference. Also, a detour, because of a reroute and my weird GPS, the four hours I expected to drive turned into seven and a half hours of full stops, starts, wrong turns—frustration. With a suggestion to follow the traffic back to the highway, I rolled my window down to ask the driver stopped in the opposite direction if he had any idea what was ahead of me. “Washington courthouse. A few mom-and-pop restaurants—and if you’re looking for souvenirs there’s some nice ones.” Oh. I breathe deeply, and a long sigh, and say thank you. Halted there my mind accelerates, I don’t need souvenirs, I need the highway. Then, it’s another hour before I drive over 25 mph again, I am down to the red on gas and completely out of patience.

We can travel a similar journey with faith. Sometimes you know where you’re going—an open road and a well-marked path, both. But sometimes you feel stalled, like everyone seems to be moving ahead and you’re back at mile marker eight trying to make sense of the doubt and diversions. You rumble forward.  

And I hate to pick on the Israelites. Over and over they’re the example of what not to do. But because I feel like I relate to them—struggle with them as a human to just be and trust God’s destination—I like to remember a few things they got right. They showed us how it was: hard, dusty, uncertain. But also, how tough and gritty our faith is. They were faithful, one-day-at-a-time, and trusted what the dust made impossible to see. 

Full of faith

The word faithful shows up in Merriam-Webster as “unswerving adherence to a person or thing or to the oath or promise by which a tie was contracted.” It also means to be “full of faith,” and I like this simple thought. I wonder, too, if that’s what we can take from this verse in Hebrews 3:2, “Moses was faithful in all God’s house.” Like Moses, we can journey ahead and trust God’s hope and plan. 

In fact, don’t you just love this perfect, “being built bigger” perspective? It takes the pressure off of plotting our own way. We know that Moses was born to a Hebrew woman. God had a plan for him to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land. And He did. But Moses’ life shows us what it means to recognize joy in the small details and detours of the day, because when you read his story, there is hardly ever the sense that Moses arrived in faith. But rather, Moses took small, slow steps to the bigger faith God had planned. Moses shows us that in our faith journey, middles are as important as beginnings and endings. It’s not always (very rarely) the destination we may have mapped out. We can trust though, that God is faithful, first. He will lead us where He wants us to go. 

While you travel, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the traffic of trials or wondering where the next road of obedience might lead…He leads, we follow. And if you’re taking a road trip with me, sometimes you even take detours and pick up a few more souvenirs.

"We can trust though, that God is faithful, first." Faithful by @DuewelBeth – The Word on Wednesday #Twow #devotional #faith Share on X

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