3 signs you're getting ready to leave

How do you know when you're almost ready to move?

1. Minimal is a good word.You stop buying food because you have to eat up what's in the pantry. Extra clothes = giveaways. Less is better. "Just enough" is enough. Of everything.
2. Non-essentials stop: shopping, visits, and appointments. You've got to do what has to get done; so everything else goes out the window.
3. Your calendar of "last things" is crammed. It may not be a pretty list, but the squares are full.

• Dental checkup
• Dr./physical
• Vaccines at Bartell's
• Open cabin for the kids
• Final writer's critique group
• Accountability group meeting
• (And the strangest entry of all, July 1) "Goodbye to everything"

We must be nearly ready to leave.

Read more:

*[When love of God and care for others is our priority:] Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. Isaiah 58:8-9a NIV

*If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all. Isaiah 7:9 ESV

*Jesus said to Simon Peter, "I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail." Luke 22:32 NASB

Moravian Prayer: In days of doubt and in days of certainty, we pray, Lord, that our faith will always rest in you. Strengthen our hearts and our faith, trusting Lord. Amen.

C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity: 

Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes.

Laziness means more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often  one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.

It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way — centred on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.