Today's readings: Ps 22, 148; Ez 18:1-4, 25-32; Phil 4:1-9; John 17:9-19
In the days before GPS and MapQuest, it was common for people embarking on a long car trip to visit AAA or another travel agent to get customized route maps (AAA still calls them TripTiks). An atlas could only get you so far before you needed additional city and street maps for the local details. Today we just click on “zoom.” But past or present, we need to know the end point of our journey to get directions. Our Lenten journey doesn’t work quite that way.
Our Lenten journey ends with resurrection – Easter – and we know the annual stories and readings that act as signposts throughout the season. But if our end point is a living, contemporary, present Christ, simply retracing 2000 year old steps – no matter how sacred – won’t get us there. Plenty of us are intimately familiar with Christ’s journey, yet stuck spinning our wheels. Without knowing direction resurrection may take in our own lives, how can we know in what direction to start our journey?
Ezekiel knows. The prophet advises his listeners the way forward is to repent – literally, to “turn around” their lives. A journey can begin because we have somewhere to go to – or somewhere to leave from. Even if we don’t know where we will end up, we generally know what in our lives we need to walk away from. Of course knowing is much easier than doing. Abuse, addiction, anger – if these things were easy to leave, Ezekiel could have kept his day job. It’s easier to stay in a bad or even dangerous yet familiar situation than to walk the unknown road. Rather than following a prescribed map, we find ourselves in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” scenario, where each choice leads us down an unknown path. We hope for a happy ending, but if things don’t work out, we can retrace our steps and begin again. And God will travel with us every time.
No matter how much we might like it to be so, faith is not a matter of following someone else’s maps, no matter how beautifully they’ve been drawn. God calls us to the uncharted territory of broken places – our own and others – and to the kingdom of wholeness waiting beyond.
Comfort: All steps taken in faith are in the right direction.
Challenge: Start a “travel journal” to map your Lenten adventures.
Prayer: God of the journey, thank you for trusting me to go new places.
Evening readings: Ps 105, 130
Discussion question:
Is there anywhere you both desire and fear to go?
I vividly recall reading "Choose Your Own Adventure" Batman books when I was a kid. "If you think Batman should follow the Joker, go to page 193. If you think Batman should return to the Batcave, go to page 89." I don't know if it was considered cheating, but I always left my finger in the current page and checked both my options...
ReplyDeleteI think that's the scariest part of a faith journey; I can't keep one foot where I am and take a tentative step with the other foot to see what will happen. I can stay or I can go; I can't do both. If I make a mistake in life/faith, there's no easy way back to where I started from. There's only the question "Where do I go from here?" And many times my options are not so clearly marked.