Journey

A question often floated around in the spiritual/religious world is “Where are you at in your journey with Christ?” In an interview for my present job I was presented with this question. I had to answer a similar phrased question for church membership. I have to admit that I find this question hard to answer. It’s as if we can locate on a map an exact starting point and ending point, as if the religious experience is so cut and dry. We start here and we end here. And I guess on some level it is that cut and dry, that simple. We are born, created by the Divine, and we die and meet the Divine. Every human life follows this same linear path. But I have found that the spiritual experience can be anything but linear and direct. In fact, I would propose that many times the path God chooses to lead us to Him and the path He asks us to walk with Him on can be quite winding and indirect.

Take Abraham and Sarah for example. God told Abraham to “get himself up and go from this land”. Direct, no doubt. Clear was God’s command. Get up! Get moving! However, God chose to leave out a very important detail, the destination. Abraham was not told where he was going; only that he was going to the land that God was going to deliver to him. Now how would Abraham have answered this spiritual question of “Where are your at in your journey with Christ?” He could most certainly answer that he was on a journey with his Maker. Of that there was no doubt. But he had no clue where he was in this journey because God had not even given him the final destination. God’s plan was masked, veiled, hidden from Abraham. In bits and pieces God revealed Himself and His plan to Abraham, but even then could Abraham really fathom what God had in store. Could he really see the final outcome, the end result, the destination that God had planned for him? Abraham, a fatherless old man who the Bible tells us his ability to conceive children had pretty much dried up, would be the father of a host of people, a large nation that could not be counted. How could he possibly comprehend that and if he could, how could he even possibly begin to map out how he’d get from Point A, childless, to Point B, a father of one…let alone a nation?

How about David? I am sure that if David lived today he would be labeled bipolar, suicidal, schizophrenic, or just plain crazy. Have you read the Psalms? He could in one passage, one day, one event, bless the Lord of all Creation. He could in the next Psalms doubt the Creator’s love and mercy, wondering if he had been forsaken. David could traverse a jumble of emotions toward his maker and capture it one Psalms, revealing both his doubt and anxiety about his Lord’s intentions and motives and yet claiming unwavering faith in this same Lord’s grace and sovereignty. If you tried to place David’s journey with God on a map, well you’d be all over the place. It’d look more like a connect-the-dots page than a map with clear, concise starting and ending points.

These men of God, not only traveled strange and sometimes tumultuous paths with their Master Planner, but sometimes they seemed to have fallen off in the ditch somewhere along the way. David orchestrated the murder of a man, hired a hit man if you will, to cover up his having sex with another’s man’s wife and her becoming pregnant as a result. And Abraham lied about his wife, putting her in harm’s way; something he did not once, but twice. Seems he fell into the same pothole more than once. Yet, they rose from their ditches with their scars and bruises, gathered themselves up and got back on the road traveling with the only One they knew could get them to wherever they were going.

And that is what my journey is. It’s walking. Sometimes I am sure there is a clear path and I can see the lights of place I am to be just ahead, in the distance between the trees. There are other times I feel like I’m wallowing in a ditch with briars and mud; it’s then I wonder where I am going and where the supposed Almighty and Friend of the forlorn is. But what remains, clear path ahead with a clear destination marked with potholes to avoid and streams to rest at or a path filled with potholes that veers off the clearly marked road more than I can comprehend, is that I’m walking. And I am not alone. Sometimes I can feel the Presence of the one that permeates the morning dew as if He covered me with a cloak of warmth, heavy and soft and light. Sometimes I walk through a fog so thick I can’t see my hand in front of me let alone see a God too mysterious for my mind to grasp. Yet I walk. I can’t always tell you where I am at on my journey and even if I could and even when I know my destination I have no idea how I will arrive there. And when I think I do know it’s then I find God’s voice so direct saying, “Get up! Get moving!” And to my replies of where and how, He simply beckons, “Get up! Get moving! I’ll show you.” So I walk. That’s what I know. I’m on a journey with the Divine, rarely linear, rarely direct, and rarely simple in its path. In fact, downright confusing is the process. Yet so simple: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”