After the death of Moses the servant of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua, “Moses my servant is dead.  Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River …” (Joshua 1:1-2).

What got you here may not be all you need to get you there.

As the book of Joshua opens, the people of Israel are at a significant “restart” moment.  Forty years of wilderness wanderings are coming to an end.  The Jordan River, the boundary marker between wilderness and Promised Land, is just ahead.  A people whose parents had only known slavery, and who themselves knew only wilderness, are on the verge of a whole new way of life.

And Moses is dead.  Moses, the human source of the first five books of the Bible, Moses, who appears for the first time in Exodus 2 and then dominates Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, is dead.  Moses, who led God’s people to the very edge of the Promised Land is gone; the one who got them here will not be able to get them there.  

Major changes in our lives—and restarts are one kind of change—always feel like a kind of death at first.  It’s one of the main reasons we tend to resist change: change means a kind of ending to what was “home,” what was familiar, comfortable.  Even if what we had grown accustomed to was slavery.  Or wilderness.  Or pandemic restrictions and uncertainty.

“Restart” does not necessarily mean getting back to the way things used to be, or picking up where we left off, or a return to “normalcy.”  God is not committed to underwriting our agendas and projects.  God is not an “ingredient” in our restart recipes. God is committed to shaping us to be the kind of people who are able and willing to embrace and engage God’s project of reconciling all things to himself through the second, greater Joshua.

Yes, we are all weary of restrictions, isolation, not being able to be together, economic pressures.  We want our kids and grandkids back in school, businesses to reopen, and for working from home to be an option instead of a requirement.  We want to stop having to view other people as potential threats to our health, to no longer feel that a trip to a store or a restaurant might be a risky undertaking.

But as we’re thinking about Restart! we must keep in the front of our minds and hearts that God doesn’t think in terms of our normal, but in terms of his kingdom.  What got us here, what got us to the point of wanting and needing a restart, may be where challenging change is needed.  Some things, some good things, some God-given things—even Moses!—may need to undergo a kind of dying in order that the purposes of God might come to greater fruition.

Here’s how that second, greater Joshua put it: If we try to save our lives, we end up losing them.  If we “lose” our lives by following him, we will in fact become more truly and fully alive.

Are there some things you’re just “dying to restart” that God might want to adjust, mess with, redirect?  Add to?  How could restarting for you begin in prayer rather than racing off to “do something”?