Most of us as cross-cultural workers are well-accustomed to obeying in the hard decisions. After all, we left everything that was familiar and traveled to foreign lands filled with different languages, cultures, and customs. Many of us felt a clear calling to a particular place or people group. For others, perhaps there was simply a need and invitation in which we gave our ‘yes’ in faith.

What I do think may be the bigger difficulty, for us and humanity in general, really, are the times of obedience in the unknowns of our day-to-day.

The Israelites also obeyed the Lord in an incredibly daunting exit of the lives they had known for generations, as shown in the well-known story in Exodus as they were brought out of Egypt. What struck me almost more, however, was their obedience recorded in Numbers 9, where they followed the Lord’s daily leading of where they would camp and for how long through the movement of his presence in the cloud of fire covering the tabernacle (Numbers 9:16).

The Lord did not give the Israelites a clear plan of when he would lead them out and when he would have them stay. Moses writes, “Whether the cloud stayed over the tabernacle for two days or a month or a year, the Israelites would remain in camp and not set out; but when it lifted, they would set out. At the Lord’s command they encamped, and at the Lord’s command they set out. They obeyed the Lord’s order” (Numbers 9:22-23). They could be encamped in that particular place for a day or for a year, but whenever the cloud would rise, they had to pack everything up and move once more. That must have been an extremely difficult way of living, yet the Israelites followed God’s leading.

This particular passage in Numbers 9 convicted my heart toward what that type of trust and obedience could look in my own life. I gave my “big” yes in 2017 when we packed up and moved to East Africa. And as hard as that was, it was clear and followed a long-awaited plan. Can I also give the Lord my continuous obedience as His Holy Spirit guides daily, often without much warning, like He did with the Israelites through the cloud of His presence?

When I am met with the abrupt opportunity to take a call or host a needy visitor who is going through a difficult situation when that disrupts my previous plans, will I pick up my tent pegs, so to speak, and follow the Lord’s leading there as well?

Father, help us to see your leading in our day-to-day lives, and may we obey no matter how unknown or abrupt that obedience will be.