We returned to Kia this weekend.

I wanted Lori to test drive a car I had driven. We also drove some new ones.

We had some good results. I don’t know if anything comes of it.

This, however, is the part that got me.

We spent some time with one of the salespeople who seemed the most helpful.

One of his colleagues asked what I did for a living. I said I was a minister. So this guy picked up on it and said you’re Christian, right?

He was also a believer, and we started talking cars, and cities, and faith.

We shared that we were both transplants to New York City, each with about 25 years here, enough time that it had become a part of us, but that we still recognized that its rhythms weren’t all the way in us.

I recalled some conventional wisdom I received early in my time here, that it was so high stimulus, that you tended to become addicted to the pace, whether or not it was actually good.

And I remember sharing that idea with a college classmate at a reunion, who said this was a revelation to him. His parents were New Yorkers, who had moved to Northern California, where he grew up. And he said he never understood, growing up, why his were the only parents who got mad. To me it illustrated the way in which geography and culture could hardwire us for life, for better or for worse.

The salesman acknowledged the same, saying, I came from Arizona, from Dirt Roads, and pickup trucks. And then he proceeded to recount a history that took him from the Southwest, to the Midwest, to the South, to several countries in Europe while in the army, to here.

And then he talked about the idea of leaving New York to start something new, and said ”sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.”

And that’s the part that stuck with me. Sometimes a place is so much a part of our experience, that we can’t imagine life apart from it. Sometimes that we spend so much time and life, somewhere, and experience so many milestones, and rites of passage there, that we don’t even know who we are without it.

And sometimes God calls us to spend our lives there. You used to be the kid in little league, and now you’re the coach guiding a new generation. You used to play on the block, and now you own a business or a brownstone there. God calls us to bring life to the places that birthed us. Proverbs 22:6 (NIV) says “⁶ Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” Sometimes God gives us the blueprint early, whether we follow it right away, or come back to it after along journey.

Sometimes, however God calls us to leave. Perhaps the place that birthed us is launching us somewhere new. Perhaps the light you need to shine can’t fully radiate under the awning you presently occupy.

And perhaps, in our youth, God revealed the “what”, but not the “where.” Plenty of people told me, from childhood, up through my 20s, that I was a teacher. And I thought it was the worst idea I had ever heard. Because I thought that meant being a schoolteacher in Vermont, which, while it had greatly impacted me through the teachers I had had, didn’t speak to me at all. But it turned out, in a different state, and a different setting, that teaching would be exactly where I would find purpose. So maybe those people weren’t so crazy after all.

My prayer for you today is that you take your leap of faith.

I pray you find strength in the jump. I pray you find courage in the air. And I pray you find purpose on new ground.

I saw a young woman at church on Sunday who I haven’t seen in months. Lori and I used to see her every week, but she has moved across the country. And one of the things I told her, after catching up, was how proud we were of her. Because she has taken her gifts in the arts, and passion for people, and jumped. She went to school. She went on the auditions. She started the business. And now, instead of just talking about things she’d like to do, or wished she had, she was talking about the things she was doing, even with all the growing pains that might bring.

I pray today you take your leap of faith.

And I pray that you hit the ground running.

Travelling mercies.