My wife Jess and I will be moving to our new house in Oneonta, NY in a few days. We’re both excited to move and to make the new place “home,” but we’re still in the “between” stage. Our current house is all boxed up, the furniture collected in staging areas, and a large number of house plants have been gathered into one or two rooms. Due to packing the place up and a few recent events that made the property feel less than safe, we don’t really feel like we belong at this house anymore. We’re ready to settle into the new place, and the sooner the better! Being in-between homes has left us feeling a bit discombobulated and out of place.

Abraham also experienced a “between” stage when it came to the place he would call home. God called him to leave his home in the land of Ur and travel to the Promised Land. Abraham’s journey was much longer than ours, full of danger, and the endpoint was not entirely clear: “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8).

When the journey of obedience was completed, and Abraham looked back at his life, he would see that faith was still needed. God had been faithful in so many ways, but Abraham “died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (11:13).

There are plenty of “between” phases in life when the outcome or endpoint of our journey is not entirely clear or even fully realized. These are the times when by faith we go out, even though we don’t know exactly where we are going. We go out, even when there are few of us. We go out, even if the path is unmarked. We go out, and like Abraham, by faith, we take the ground that God has promised to us.

The Kingdom Fellowship has been richly blessed with people that display this kind of dauntless faith. Indeed, we are rich with “the inheritance of those who fear Your name” (Psalm 61:5). As I’ve been writing, the person who keeps coming to mind is my dear friend David Murray — a man who followed in the footsteps of Abraham. As one who “by faith … when he was called, obeyed…” His life encouraged all those around him to walk by faith, to pursue reality with God, and to look forward to “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16).

Let us walk with God like Abraham and David Murray, with our eyes fixed on the Author and Perfecter of our faith. The “between” phase might last a lifetime, but the final destination is no mystery. Our longing for home will be truly satisfied in this “better country,” in the presence of our Maker, and the company of a “great a cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). Oh, what a homecoming that will be!