“The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Resume your journey, and go into the hill country of the Amorites as well as into the neighboring regions—the Arabah, the hill country, the Shephelah, the Negeb, and the seacoast—the land of the Canaanites and the Lebanon, as far as the great river, the River Euphrates. See, I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them.’
- Deuteronomy 1:6-8
One of my favorite arcade games is Pop-a-Shot, where a machine continually rolls basketballs to you while you try to make as many shots in the hoop as you can before time runs out. It always takes a few seconds for me to get my form figured out, but once I get in a rhythm, I can usually make as many as 20 shots in a row without clanging one—it’s all about simply repeating the same motion over and over again.
But then, once your time is halfway up, something happens—the backboard starts moving. All of a sudden you’re having to aim at a moving target, to try and score in a goal that’s utterly unpredictable. The form you relied on in the first half doesn’t do you any good in the second—when the game changes, you have to adapt to it.
Life can feel like a game of Pop-a-Shot sometimes. The older you get, the more it starts to feel like you’ve got a handle on this thing, like the rhythms you’ve developed are just what you need to get through. Then, without warning, the targets start moving on you. When that time comes, you have to decide: will you stick with what you’ve been doing, or try something new?
A story from the Old Testament offers a possible answer. In the days of Moses, God’s people spent decades wandering through the wilderness in search of the land the Lord had promised them. The entire generation whom Moses had led out of Egypt had passed on, and a new generation now made their way toward Canaan armed with their legacy. All they had ever known was the wilderness, the cloud by day and fire by night, the manna and quail God generously provided.
But when the time came for God to deliver the promised land to them, He required them to change what they’d been doing. “You have stayed long enough at this mountain,” he told them. “See, I have set the land before you; go and take possession” of it.
Life doesn’t stand still; it moves like a Pop-a-Shot backboard. And when it does, it is incumbent upon God’s people to listen to His voice and to discern how He wants us to respond. Faced with a moving target, don’t get stuck repeating your old tricks—move forward with His blessing and go into what God has set before you.
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