Disconnect: the break
Abram leaves Ur
The very first word God speaks to Abram is a word of disconnection: go. Leave your country. Leave your relatives. Leave your father's house — every layer of belonging a man could have, peeled away one at a time — and set out for a land that God will show him. Will show him. Not has shown him. The destination is a promise, still over the horizon; the only thing concrete in the command is the leaving.
This is how upheaval begins — not with arrival but with departure, a break from the known before the new is anywhere in sight. The letter to the Hebrews says Abram obeyed and went out, not knowing where he went. That is the signature of the disconnect phase: you move before you can see, you lose the old address before you are given the new one. The faith it requires is not the faith to reach the land; it is the faith to leave Ur.
“Get out of your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you.”
— The LORD, to Abram — Genesis 12:1 (WEB)
“By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out to the place which he was to receive for an inheritance. He went out, not knowing where he went.”
This is Disconnect — the break, the leaving, the loss of the old before the new appears. What it asks of us: to let go of the known on the strength of a promise we cannot yet see, and to stop trying to reach the new land without leaving Ur.
Your disconnect may be a conviction you cannot un-see, a leaving God is quietly asking of you — a job, a relationship, a comfortable version of faith you have outgrown. Disconnect is the hardest phase to choose, because it is pure subtraction: you give up the old before the new arrives, and for a while your hands are simply empty. So we try to skip it, to reach the new land while still living at the old address. It cannot be done. The grief of the leaving is real, and you must not let anyone shame you for it. But the call is real too, and the promise travels with you. There is no reorientation without disconnection; you cannot be remade while you are gripping the old shape with both hands. The break is not God being cruel; it is God making room. And the faith of this phase is small and enormous at once: to obey the go before you can see the land, trusting that the One who said leave will not leave you.
The Church's disconnect is its break with a form that no longer serves the gospel — a model, a cultural alliance, a way of doing things that had quietly become the thing itself. Every reformation in the Church's history has been a disconnection, and every disconnection has been mourned by someone who loved the old arrangement. Whole traditions have been called to leave their Ur: to set out from Christendom's lost privileges, from inherited certainties, from a settled house, toward a land God had not yet shown them. In such a season the Body carries a hard double duty before a watching world — to honor honestly what is being grieved, and still to obey the go.
The God who calls. Abram lost his country, his kin, his father's house — but not the Voice that spoke. What cannot be shaken in any leaving is the One who goes with you into the unknown and is Himself the inheritance at the end of it.
- What is the Ur God may be asking me to leave before I can see the land?
- Where am I trying to be remade while still clutching the old shape with both hands?
- Can I trust the One who says leave to not leave me?
Lord, You ask me to go before You show me where. Give me Abram's faith — to obey the leaving on the strength of Your promise, to grieve honestly and go anyway, trusting that You who called me will not abandon me on the road. Amen.