Destination as Journey

Watch this…

Did you catch it…

“… the journey is the destination.” The punch line of this comercial caught my attention. The comercial seems trivial at first (I mean lets face it, we ran out of creative ideas to sell cars about 10 years ago) but I realized this was scratching the surface of something very profound. Of course the comercial is about vacations and cars but, what if instead of thinking about vacation we thought about vocation?

Fredrick Buechner explains the truth of the gospel in three ways. The gospel is a tragedy. Before there is good news there is bad news. The gospel is not the gospel without humans who are sinful, evil, naked, wretches who can at best see God only dimly and from afar. Only after we begin to understand and experience the brokenness and darkness of our world, the gospel becomes a comedy. It is a comedy because Jesus comes to “the last people you might expect, the stooges and scarecrows of the world, the tax collectors and misfits. The people, the broken people, the ones who in terms of the world’s wisdom are children and madmen and fools. They have cut themselves shaving. Rich or poor, successes or failures as the world counts it, they are the ones who are willing to believe in miracles because they know it will take a miracle to fill the empty place inside them where grace and peace belong with grace and peace.” After the reality of brokenness and the silliness of grace, the gospel becomes a fairy tale. A beautiful fairy tale, where we are free to be a character in God’s perfect story.

Approaching the world with wonder like Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we will be able to experience new worlds of fulfillment and joy. Simply by taking another step, pushing fir coats aside, and feeling the crunch of snow under our feet and cool air against our skin we are able to be characters in the greatest story ever told.

I am entering my senior year of college. I am 22 years old. I am uncertain of the direction of the next road in my journey. For the first time in my life I do not know what I will be doing a year from now. Interestingly, for a strange reason, I think I enjoy this. (I feel like I finally understand the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.) I am open to be totally submissive to God’s call on my life. When I was in high school everyone told me to savor the time because “high school is the best time of your life”. Then when I got to college my friends and I concluded that college was better than high school. Now that I am approaching the last quarter of my college life I wonder if post-college will in fact be better still.

We live in a world where contentment is not only relative but temporary. I do not ever foresee myself finished with discerning my vocation. I will always be on a journey. A journey with no final earthly destination. A journey of seeking truth, loving many, and following the Spirit of God.