Where do I Start?
Sometimes we ask the question where do I start? with the boldness or conviction to face an unpleasant task and get it over with as quickly as possible. Occasionally, we say it with despair, wondering where the time or energy or help will come from to unravel all the disloyalty, betrayal, and abuse we’ve suffered in our life.
Where do I start is therefore a question whose emphasis lies somewhere between our personality and history, and between our will to overcome and our fear that we cannot.
However, there is another way to approach how we begin: Where would God have us start?
In the defining story of the Old Testament, God liberates the Israelites from slavery. He begins by separating them from their oppressors and moves them from a place of abuse to one of safety. It’s an obvious first step, but what he communicates to them once they arrive in this safe place is surprisingly devoid of any mention of forgiveness and all focussed upon their identity.
He calls them his treasured possession, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.* It’s a phenomenal statement to make to a group of recently released slaves whose lives had been treated as a commodity for an empire to use and abuse.
But by beginning like this, God reminds them that he defines their identity, not their past. He declares that slavery will not have the last word. And by saying this he is telling them that there is incredible healing available, because how else can you minister God’s love to the world as priests, when that world includes your Egyptian slave-masters if this isn’t true?
The thing that may ruin this good news is that God says it in the future tense: you will be... It’s not that we’re not these things already in God’s eyes, it’s that we’re not yet these things in our own eyes.
There’s a journey ahead of us, we know this all too well, but only a revelation of who we truly are and who we will become, will inspire us with the hope and motivation to lament our past, forgive our wrongdoers, and walk into a new future.
*See Exodus 19:5-6
