Genesis 12:1-4
By faith Abram! Even if we imagine years are being counted differently - Abram's dad lived to 250 so 75 might be pretty sprightly yet - Abram is no young man when he sets out from Haran with his wife and his nephew and his slaves (sorry to say) along with a bunch of stuff he's collected over the years. As a slightly older fellow myself I have bills and responsibilities and people around me to whom I am accountable: children, parents, friends, and so on. Let me imagine this call:
Hey, mom, it's Abe. I just wanted to let you know that I'm moving to Pittsburgh in a couple days. No, no, it's nothing like that, everybody is fine, yes I am still employed here but I guess I will have to quit, let me put it on the list. No I don't have a job lined up, no I don't have a house there, just moving. No I don't know anybody. Yes Sarah is fine. It's nothing reallly, just that God came to me and told me that I needed to move. What do you mean what did Sarah say? God told me to do it, what was she going to say? No she's not pregnant, but God did say I was going to make a great nation. No I have not taken up miniatures. Oh, I think Lot's coming too. Yes, Pittsburgh, that's right.Pretty sure the next knock on the door would be the police for a wellness check, and then all my closest relatives spaced out by however long it took them to get to me. Seriously - Abram is an adult, responsible for the health and welfare of his wife and all his entourage. This passage makes it feel so capricious!
I'm no Abram, and I wish that I could have the relationship with God that Abram has over the next few chapters. But I have had some nudges that I attribute to the Spirit over the years, and a handful that I tried like Jonah to avoid and could not*. If I believed that God was telling me out of the blue to move my family, with its commensurate impact on them, our church, our community, our friends and the rest of the family ... frankly, I don't know what I would do (PS - God if you could not test me this way I would appreciate it!). Even with affirming counsel, even if I could back propagate a rationale, even if the family was in accord, but I was comfortable where I was - would I quash the movement of the Spirit? Would I Gideon up some sheepskins until I couldn't keep track - oh look, that one is dry, didn't I ask for wet? Jesus knew not to test God, but I wonder how well I do.
*Sometimes the consequences of these have felt pretty terrible, even if with counsel and prayer they were obviously right actions. Abram's journey wasn't so great either - not to spoil it but he ends up in Egypt during a famine, they wander into Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's wife turns to salt, and it is just a hard life all around. Abram, moving then, did indeed become the father of a great nation - but despite going right to the land of the promise he did not get to stay there, and the benefit of his faith was mostly accorded to his heirs, not so much in his lifetime. Thinking about it now I am humbled by how often I have reacted to these events like Israel in the desert: "why did you start this thing at all, if this is how it is going to end?" But by faith...
Getting back to the passages, I am also struck by Jesus' description of the Spirit in John 3:8 reflecting in Abram's life here: "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." Having seen this example in our forebear, how little is it to ask us, prodded of the Spirit, to move, sometimes, without a clear reason but just because that is the way the Spirit is blowing - not understanding what is happening, nor why, nor how it might end, but traveling along because of the very messenger of Christ in us.
PS - This passage in mind I do want to put in a good word for formal mental health care. There are important differences between nudges of the Spirit and mental health disorders, and a good, well-trained therapist should be able to suss out what is a nudging toward some good action versus a characteristic of some self-destructive pattern or disordered thinking. God created us in community, and relying on the community of believers to test the Spirit is absolutely critical and unquestionably Biblical; I love my counselors and include them in most of my decisions, but I also understand that they don't have formal training to recognize bad behaviors in the way a professional does. If you don't have a mental health expert in your corner, your pastor should be able to help you find one!