Now there was a famine in the land. (Gen 12,10)

The turning point came, and the magic God used to help him with had apparently ceased to work.

Of course, Abram noticed the connection between obeying God and how he grew more and more prosperous. He first entered an uncertain ground when he and his family left Ur for ever. But things got better and better, until Haran. There, where he grew economically, he made a big decision between the early and the eternal. For the first time, he "wrote off" what he had received from God and went to a less civilized country, to greater uncertainty. So far, following God has paid off, he got rich and he did well. If that had been all he cared about, he would not have left Haran. What moved him to leave? Was it obedience to God or rather the fact that he still did not reach the fullness of the promise - he did not have the promised land and the descendant? In the light of how we see his character so far and the changes to which he matured only later on, we cannot not have much illusions. For now, Abram was able to lose his earthly things - because he expected to find (earthly) things even better.

Although it is not easy to accept, on our path of pursuit of God we are sometimes unexpectedly derailed, in other words: God uses "hunger" for our growth. If there is something we really miss in life, where our needs are pushing us, it may be the place where God wants to bless us. But he wants to do it in his own special way, leading us to inner transformation. As A. W. Tozer once said: "If God is to bless a man, he must first overcome him." However, Abram did not yet know these strange ways of God - so far everything went smoothly, simply and from Abram's point of view it was heading towards the goal. It couldn't last long, and the offspring God had promised would come, he told himself.

The crisis therefore shook him deeply. What will he do now that everything he has received from God seems to run away from him? Things have stopped working, the promised land is becoming uninhabitable... Abram did not yet fully know the faith of which he was to become a father. He therefore responded with a shortcut. It was the crises, this one and many others that will follow, that would lead him to the knowledge and acquisition of real wealth that he can still pass on to us even today, four thousand years later.