"I feel a strong spiritual pull to go back to the South."

These are the words of Deborah Brown as quoted in a recent New York Times article, "For New Life, Blacks in City Head South." The article describes how many African Americans from New York and other cities in the East and the Midwest United States are moving south for better opportunities, just two generations after their ancestors moved north for the same reasons. A 2005 article in Black Enterprise noted that this "reverse migration" can be dated to the 1990s. Indeed, I was one of those people who found myself in Georgia and North Carolina in the early 2000s, not far from my grandparents' birthplaces.

About 100 years ago, many African Americans from the southern United States moved en masse from their homes. African American history refers to this as "the great migration." Between 1910 and 1940, when factory and government jobs opened up in the north, and there seemed to be an escape from the Jim and Jane Crowism of the south, almost two million African Americans left their southern homes. Another 5 million traveled during "The Second Great Migration" between 1940 and 1970. They moved along the railroad lines between Jackson, Mississippi to Memphis, Chicago, and Detroit; westward from Texas and Arkansas and Oklahoma to Kansas and California; and up the eastern seaboard to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. My grandparents were in the latter group.

They were all looking for a better life, a "promised land."

The references to the Hebrew Scriptures are evident. Just as the oppressed Hebrews left slavery in Egypt to find the promised land of milk and honey, so African Americans left a place of civil and social discrimination to find a better life.

There are many reasons to move: more bang for one's housing buck, discrimination in the so-called promised land, an environment that promises more fruit for sustenance. The newspaper article suggests all of these.

But it strikes me that Ms. Brown talks about Spirit. She feels "a spiritual pull" to go back to the land of her grandparents. Something divine is calling her south.

Jewish and Christian scriptures talk a lot about what it means to geographically move when God calls you forward. Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans; the Israelites left Egypt; Jesus left Nazareth; the apostles left Jerusalem.

As scripture engages what it means to go forth to new lands, I'm disappointed by how little it talks about how difficult it is to leave home. Over and over again, in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, the faithful are told to leave home with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They are told to trust that God will care for them.