Abraham and Isaac

This has become perhaps my favorite story in the Bible (except for maybe the Resurrection... :) the last few months and I've decided I should write about why.

It all started awhile back during the school year when I was applying for the Fulbright teaching thing. When I left Berlin after my year of studying there, I felt pretty confident that I was coming back. Somehow, the place just felt right in a way no other place had felt before - I could really see Berlin as a place God might be calling me. Usually, I fall in love with the people in a certain place, but this was the first time I fell in love with a place itself too. I felt a general call to Germany, but especially Berlin.

I knew about Fulbright and the teaching assistantship program, and this sounded like a slam-dunk. I would get a year away from academia before grad school, get teaching experience, experience Germany's school system, and spend another year in the place that I felt God calling me to (hopefully Berlin, but at the very least, Germany). So I applied, but once I applied, I had this strange feeling like it couldn't just be that easy. I didn't want to just put all my eggs in one basket, and I wanted to be sure that it was really what God wanted me to do, and not just the most obvious thing to do. I prayed a lot about it and told God that if He wanted me to do something else, I would.

After I came back to school from Christmas break I started awakening to the work God was doing in Philadelphia and on Penn's campus. All of a sudden, it seemed like God might be calling me to spend another year in Philadelphia, which had never been anywhere in my plans. Philadelphia had always basically been the city I was passing through on my way to the rest of my life. But suddenly it seemed like it might actually be a place God would ask me to serve. And I was confused. I was happy that God had opened my eyes to what He was doing there, but I battled with feeling torn between two cities. Where did God really want me? I really felt like the call to Berlin was from Him, so why would He call me to Philly too? Why would He call me to two different places? It seemed so contradictory. Needless to say, I pendled back and forth between the two for awhile. I applied for a fellowship in Philadelphia, but didn't get it. Then the prospect of interning with Campus Crusade arose, and I began to imagine myself doing that. And it was hard. The cost was high - not only my own desire to return to the great city of Berlin and to the people I knew there, and to dive into what I thought was my lifelong calling, but also the support and encouragement of so many other people in my life who (I thought) might be disappointed if I turned down the opportunity to go to Berlin. (And all the while, I actually didn't know if I'd gotten Fulbright. That came many months later.)

Somehow, at some point, God brought to mind another time when one of His children was faced with a seemingly contradictory call from God - Abraham's call to sacrifice his son, Isaac, whom he loved, whom God had promised him and who God said would be the father of many nations, as a burnt offering to Him. Why? Why would God ask for the one thing He had given and promised to Abraham? Why would He tell Abraham to sacrifice what He had said would be the fulfillment of His plan? If God said He would bless the world through the offspring of Isaac, why would He tell Abraham to kill him?

There are many reasons why God did this, not the least being a striking foreshadowing of His own sacrifice of His one and only Son, Jesus. It was a test of Abraham's faith. But it also appears to me that God wanted Abraham to be willing to give up everything for God - even the very things that God Himself had promised and called him to. He wanted to Abraham to find his identity in Himself, not in his calling to be the father of many nations, through whom all nations would be blessed.

God wanted me to be willing to give up Germany - even if it was indeed what He was calling me to. He wanted me to find my identity in Him, not in my calling. He wanted me to identify myself as His child and His faithful one, not as Christina who teaches Turkish kids in Berlin, or Christina who does ____ for God. He wanted me to just be His.

In studying this passage in the Beth Moore study The Patriarchs which I am doing this summer (P.S. I love Beth Moore and highly recommend her books and studies!), I came to realize that there are many "Isaacs" we are asked to lay down on God's altar. God routinely asks us to sacrifice the things that are not of Him for the sake of His glory, but do you realize that He asks us to sacrifice things that are of Him too? The other "Isaac" in my own life that was brought to my mind is actually a person, someone I am fully confident is not only a child of God herself, but one that He absolutely wanted me to meet and be in relationship with, and someone who shaped much of my early understanding of my relationship with God. But there came a time - a very difficult time! - when I had to lay her on that altar too, not because she herself was not part of God's plan, but because God wanted me to find my identity in Him, not in her, nor in Him through her. He wanted to be my One and Only, the only foundation I stood on. This time "Isaac" basically got taken from me by force, but it was the same principle: being asked to sacrifice something (or someone) that is good and of Him for the sake of sealing my identity, my hope, my relationship in God alone. And of course, He won't actually take these things or people from us if He doesn't have to - He stopped Abraham from killing Isaac, seeing that his faith in God would lead him to do it if God actually wanted. He did not take that person away from me, though He did greatly change our relationship (for the better!). And He did not take Berlin from me - in fact, despite the odds He gave me exactly what I believed He was calling me to! Berlin, teaching at an immigrant school, even an apartment in Pankow close to my church.......

Praise His Name!