Your prayer for travel, a season in your old home, and a new place to settle is a doorway into something fresh God is doing. The desire to glorify Him through your work is a beautiful thing, and He takes note of a heart set on honoring Him. Yet when we stand on the edge of a new year and a new beginning, there is a lesson from Scripture that keeps surfacing: you cannot pour new wine into old wineskins. The old containers have served their purpose, but they cannot stretch to hold what God is about to do next. So come to Him not with a set of rigid plans or a formula borrowed from another season, but with open hands, asking for fresh wisdom for this specific step.
You mentioned wanting to stay at your old home for a time. There can be comfort in the familiar, a place where you remember His past faithfulness. But even that, if clung to too tightly, can become like the old wineskin or the moldy bread the Israelites carried when they failed to inquire of the Lord. The old nature, even the old ways we once knew God, can limit us. God gives a new name, a new identity, yet we often slip back into the old patterns of thinking. Notice in your own words the contrast: old home, new home. Transition. The Lord may allow a brief season in the old to remind you of His goodness, but His call is always forward into an inheritance you have not yet possessed. The children of Israel entered the land, but they still faced battles. The new life in the Spirit is rich, but it requires us to reckon the old man dead.
If you look at the rhythm God gave His people, every seventh year was a rest for the land, and the Jubilee year was a crowning celebration of release. It came after a Sabbath of Sabbath years, as if God was saying, “I will provide so abundantly in the sixth year that you can step into rest without fear.” Starting next year might be your own kind of Jubilee, a season to trust His provision as you step away from familiar labor. But do not set your hope on a man-made calculation of a year. The point is not the date on a calendar but the posture of faith: the old covenant depended on man’s effort and failed; the new covenant rests entirely on God’s faithfulness. He has made you a new creature in Christ, and the old things are passing away. That includes old anxieties about provision, old ways of making things happen.
As you plan these religious engagements, be careful not to wrap the new thing God is doing in old religious systems. Tradition has a way of making us say, “The old is better,” even when God is breaking the skins to give new wine. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day clung to their traditions and missed the Mediator of a better covenant. Jesus did not come to patch up an old garment but to build something entirely new, where forgiveness is complete and His Spirit writes the law on our hearts. So when you go to these gigs, go not as a performer tied to a routine, but as one who has died and now lives by the life of Christ. Let every engagement flow from a quiet center of having first put God at the center of your plans. When we give Him the first, He fills the presses with new wine.
So here is my counsel: take this next year as a clean sheet. Spend this time ahead, before the travel begins, in a kind of Sabbath rest of the soul, asking the Lord for specific strategy. What worked in one place will not necessarily work in another. Joshua learned that the hard way with the Gibeonites; he sized up their story without seeking the Lord’s mouth, and the old bread and worn sandals fooled him. Do not let what looks obvious from the outside be your guide. Inquire of the Lord. He has a new tactic for this new season.
And as for a new home, trust that He who swore to Abraham is the same God who leads you. He sees the scars from the past and He alone can heal them and write a new story. Old psychic wounds and disappointments do not determine your future. You are in Christ, and He makes all things new. The God of the Old Testament who revealed Himself as merciful, gracious, and long-suffering is the very same God who judged sin on the cross so that you could walk in newness of life. He does not change. So bring your travel plans before Him, hold them loosely, and let His Spirit direct. He will either confirm the path or gently close the door, and either way, you can rest in His governance. May this coming year be marked not by the anxiety of making everything happen, but by the deep joy of seeing Jesus, your Mediator, go before you and prepare the way.