Dearest supporters,
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Some weeks ago I made a promise to my team that I desired to grow in honesty and vulnerability, and while I have made strides in understanding what that means, I don’t think I have reached a point where the reality of that promise has transferred into truth. Still I have not done so with you all, and I desire to keep my words as they keep me.
In part I haven’t done so because I don’t believe any one reads these blogs because they’re verbose (uses too many words), redundant, un-relatable, and as useful as rope-less jump rope – all things I fear I’ve become. Writing these has been more chore than privilege. But for those who read on, and contrary to Dante Alighieri, do NOT abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Progressing lethargically towards the finish line – all the while the incubation of the ending is reaching its maturation – I’m out here on the El Camino de Santiago (the way of Saint James) in Spain discovering more of how little I know and have come to know, and how distant I feel near the conclusion; and it’s as terrifying as it sounds. I have less than two months left out here before I return to Trader Joe’s orange chicken, steamed broccoli, dad’s french toast, Chick-fil-a, and yes, home; and that means family and friends – which are good things. But I can’t help but breathe in a sickening disillusionment that has seemed to come back to me at a time when I should be pressing in further and even harder than before, all because I simply keep forgetting its ability for invasion.
Despite whatever I claim to know, have yet to discover, or don’t know that I am going to happen upon, the end is encroaching upon me, and I can’t lie to you and say that I’m not frightened; I can’t pretend I’m not afraid of the end, and worst of all I am afraid that nothing has changed me. I left home, I left you all, to not be the same person I was by the time I come back home. Perhaps it was a fallacious endeavor, vain even, and the pressure of performance has always latently lingered. And now it’s showing again, even wreaking, in all I do.
Walking, rather hiking, an average of 22/23 kilometers per day – aside from today – has bruised me in more ways than the physical blisters on my toes. What exactly is the point of it all? Why did I elect to be gone from home, from comforts, from sanctuary, from peace, for an entire year (roughly), to pack and unpack a backpack every day, be constantly uncomfortable, live with complete strangers with whom I have nothing in common, and be surrounded and sometimes internally exhausted by foolish things?
-“What is the purpose?” I’ve asked with no reply.
-Really? Do I have an anesthetic memory?
Earlier this year, I wrote a blog about royal sonship, and how quickly I forgot about it the moment I no longer felt like a son, but rather like a foreigner in a strange land because of circumstances. What have I conceded to the demand of sin, exchanging the truth of who God says I am for a facsimile and counterfeit?
Perhaps this is the moral trope of my journey: a journey to sonship, something we all must discover as a son and daughter of God, setting aside its contemporary connotations, but actually hold it tight, allowing it fashion and weave His identity inside of our hidden being so that Christ may be glorified in and through us because we are most satisfied with Him. “Christ in me, the hope of glory.” (Col 1:27)
As I was investing time in the word (for He promises a yield if only we seek it), I was reading Proverbs 13 (because today is the 13th day of October), and re-read verse 4, which states, “The light of the righteous shines brightly, but the lamp of the wicked will be snuffed out.” I’m not so concerned about the conjunction as much as I am about the former, because in the midst of my reading I simply got the words, “Be and do.” Is it my light that shines or the light that shines in me? A lamp is man-made, but who can create light? Sure, we know about electricity and how to quantify it, utilize its properties, make electrical discharges to form it, but who can create it? I won’t insult your intelligence, but I will state it plainly: God is the light, and everything I have tried to do has been a lamp – eventually the oil runs out and it needs regeneration. It is not an renewable resource.
I have been made righteous, “saved by grace through faith, not of works so that no man can boast,” (Ephesians 2:9) so I needn’t concern myself with works, but just be His son and then every good work will flow from that, as it says in James.
Something this world has seemingly forgotten in the myth of the modern age, where few children have dared to venture, is knowing how to be a child of God. It only creates broken men and women. Broken men and women, in turn, do not know how to be a parent because they never knew what it was like to be a child. I am not saying, nor do I want to ever say, that someone can’t become a good father or son or mother or daughter, but how would they know how to be a good one without an example in front of them? And what greater example do we already have than the one who is unrivaled in the name of being a Good Father?
I do not know why, or if there is a purpose behind this redundant message, but perhaps it needs to be repeated (for God repeated things over and over), so I hope it encourages you as it has renewed me as I grew weary and exhausted from this year, yet held onto hope. I know I won’t be the same upon return, for it was not me who changed, but Christ in me has changed me.
