Why Wanderings?

As a regular blog reader I have often mused about what I would call my own blog. Then impulsively last week I opened my own blog. I thought about a trendy, Latin phrase as a title or the word peace in Greek or Arabic. In the end those ideas were discarded in favor of something more down-to-earth.

There are many reasons why it seems as if wanderings may be an encompassing description of my life to date. In the last 10 years of my life, I have moved a fair amount (more than a dozen times in fact). It has been a time of exploration. I spent a year of voluntary service in Ecuador and three months learning Spanish in Costa Rica; I completed my Bachelor's degree in education and moved to California to pursue my Master's degree in Cross-Cultural Studies. I have lived in many different kinds of communities- some co-ed communities with no structures and high ideals regarding simplicity, some purely-functional "communities" where rent was cheaper if we all put up with seeing each other in the kitchen and sharing our bathroom in the morning, some mentoring communities with faculty housemates, some organic student communities with written covenants, chore wheels and family-like interactions. It seems to me that much of my adult life can be summarized as wanderings, not the wanderings of the frustrated kind where one is completely lost but rather the stimulating kind where one may stumble upon new sights and smells, people and foods, sounds and languages. It reminds me of the kinds of wanderings about which one of my second graders just wrote a story- a stroll in the woods where she found a magic red shoe that allowed her to fly with the birds. To borrow from Lord of the Rings, it seems to me that "All who wander are not lost".

I also like the word wandering because it serves as an image for my spirituality. It's an image of a journey and a process where one is not to be so fixated on the destination as much as enjoying the relationship along the way, where one is not the navigator and in fact, has never seen the big map. Often I have wished that my path would be a straight shot to some fulfilling ministry or 10 quick tips to figuring God out. Instead, for me, my faith has been full of bends in the roads, some breathtaking views, some detours, a few wrong turns, forgiveness, grace and hope.

Finally, I hope this blog can be a place where I process some of my future wanderings. I am planning to spend a couple of months in Africa this summer, Cameroon to be exact. I am planning to post some of those happenings here as well as a few of the wonderings that I'm sure will stem from that experience.