And it seems there are these moments where the novelty of a wandering life flee. that isn’t to say I'm second-guessing anything, but for the first month or two there’s this newness to it all, and every day you get bombarded with new things to understand and to grasp about the world. and then that stops, and you realize that, at least for a season, this is your actual life, and not a montage of sights and sounds on the way to something better. walking down to the market to buy rice, hand-washing yesterday’s dirty socks and hanging them to dry on the rooftop. Even the stray dogs that once served as a reminder that I was in a completely different world are familiar. I’ve even given a few of them names. My favorite is the one that usually haunts the corridor in front of Plearn Plearn coffee shop and the internet cafe. We named him Warren, which is a fine name for a dog, I think. and these things are normal, and my life here is normal, and I’m used to not being able to speak to many of my closest friends. There’s this part of me that feels so scattered. it’s like there’s a part of me in all of these people, and they’re everywhere, across the entire world, and I am nowhere. I try not to be one of the kinds of christians that gets so fixated on the idea of Heaven that I lose sight of what God is doing right now, but I am so excited for the days when my ideas of what happens in their lives are contained by whatever they happen to post on facebook. All of this is to say that, there’s this part of me that’s homesick, but I don’t have a home in the traditional sense. Home is people, and the people are scattered across the entire world, and I’m never at home without them. It’s something that I’ve wrestled with, because I really don’t want to spend the better part of my life longing for a place that doesn’t exist for me yet. But the day is coming, and I work towards that day. I’d like to think that I’m building up an immunity to homesickness, because all indications are that the wandering life will continue. I keep expecting to stumble upon the bible verses that say “you’ll reach a certain age, and then God will just say ‘do whatever you want’ and you can buy a house and raise a family and everything will be normal and you won’t ever be tight on money and you can work and work and work and get rich and just use that money to buy nice sensible things for yourself. Life is about finding a balance between your selfish desires and what God is calling you to.” and the verse that keeps getting re-emphasized and destroying that false verse is from John 14. (thanks, d-rohr.) Jesus says “you know the way to the place where I am going.” and Thomas responds, “no I don’t. I don’t even know where I’m going. How can I know the way?” and Jesus responds, “I am the way. follow me. follow me even when that seems completely crazy and mysterious. follow me even when everyone else seems to be doing normal, sensible things. follow me and trust me even when you don’t know how you’re going to pay for food.
There are the small things, though. seriously, and I promise I’m not just shouting out for myself here, but if you know someone far from home, write them a letter. it’s the little things that mean the most. for the most part I have no idea what is happening in the lives of anyone who doesn’t live in my massive ridiculous house (which, to be fair, is like 40 people, and a lot of people to keep track of.) Another simple thing was that I discovered that even though the internet shuts off at 11 PM every night, the timer is hooked to the WIFI router, not to the hardline, and there’s an ethernet cable sticking out of a corner of the library that’s still live. last night I parked my computer and downloaded some episodes of Community and the Office. and it was wonderful, because even though we all have this ridiculous crazy experience together that seems to be devoid of anything normal, today we huddled on the couch and watched television. like a normal family. it was delightful.
I haven’t updated in a long while. This isn’t a coincidence. I went to China. and everything was new and different there too and it just seems like I’m so used to “new and different” that I found myself homesick just as much for Thailand as I did for ‘Murica. however, the trip was great. I have a ridiculous journal, filled with ridiculous beauty, beauty that finds its’ meaning in the love of God. and that’s all you get from me about China, except for my photos. You can see them on my facebook. Especially important to me is the album entitled 明信片从远. It’s a selection I took from a couple of prayer walks I took around where we were staying. It was the national holiday, so the schools were closed and the children, who were for the most part unsupervised, seemed to spring out of the patchwork of every street and alleyway. it seemed to pour down rain every time I would walk, and the alleyways of the city seemed to drip with life and with pain and all of the things about humanity that escape words. Every brick and every crag in the concrete and all the little things that can turn something so ordinary into something special seemed to sing out with the stories of how a place so inconceivable can come into being. Pain, but with this small hope that renders life bearable. God’s message for China is a message of hope. There was this moment where I looked into the eyes of a young girl, and there was this small moment where I got to see in her eyes and down into her soul, and in that moment we could see each other for who we truly were. I could see the fear and the worry that she kept so deep in her being, unnatural for a child so young, and the hope that was fighting to tread among all the darkness. and the message of Christ is that the hope will win out in the end. I have lots of stories, but they all must be saved for the real world. Words on the internet are cheap. That, and the Chinese government is reading this blog. Hello there!
And now I’m back in the lovely land of the free. We got right back into the thick of things, and I had a rough week. Every time I find myself back in a classroom there’s this dark prideful part of me that says ‘you’re 22, and you have a degree, and there are better things you could be doing with your life, making money and building security for yourself.’ and there’s this other part of me that thinks that those thoughts are what got us in this mess in the first place. this is how we’ve been taught to think, and we’ve turned our beautiful world into something awful that seems to wreak pain and inner destruction on everyone who passes through it. and as much as I do a lot of thinking about “how I’m going to spend the rest of my life”, I guess the center of it is that I want to be a small vessel of hope and love in a world that seems dark and without substance. and that undertaking can’t be accomplished in the worldly ways. it requires a wandering life. a life where one doesn’t get too tied to one’s self and to the stuff we’ve been taught is necessary. the wandering isn’t the ends, it’s the means. the intended ends are to love God with one’s life, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
This absolutely destroys my initial plan, which was to be an airline pilot (this plan was hatched when I was six years old, and escaped my fleeting imagination before I turned seven.) It’s not that being an airline pilot is a bad thing, and in my experience airline pilots can be lovely people. But the problem with that plan, and every other idea I had up until about a year and a half ago, was that they were all built around wanting security and wanting affirmation from other people. and that’s all gone now, destroyed by this much more simple idea: love one another. that's it. that's my new plan. the old plans lie in ruins.
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Side note: I ended up photoshopping some of my wandering pictures and some of them turned out pretty terrific. For you, dear readers.
Praying you'll find your way to where God's got you going and it will feel like home when you get there!
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