For three years we
wandered through the desert. Often alone, sometimes together, always with our
eyes turned toward something that we could not quite see. But that unseen
something was our goal; it was what kept us going.
We used various
names at different times to describe it — our calling, our formation, our
deepening knowledge, our developing authority, our burgeoning leadership. But
it was always something “out there,” something just out of reach and slightly
out of focus.
In the midst of
all the trials and travails of the journey, we doubted the thing that we
followed. We did not believe that we would reach it or understand it or become
it. We started to think that the unseen thing was actually just something we
had made up, something that was now standing in the way of the work that was
before us.
And then the work
became the thing. So much work. Painful, back-breaking loads of work. Working
till we thought we could not go on and then working some more. And writing and
reflecting and reflecting and writing. Turning inward. Turning inward again.
Turning inward even more till we tired of ourselves.
Somehow we
supported each other. We wept together, laughed together, were homesick
together and then missed each other when we had returned home. We learned to
love each other at the same time we drove one another crazy.
But one day while
working, while preaching, while listening, while encouraging, while enduring,
we discovered that we knew things we had not known before. We discovered that
the thing that was so distant at the beginning of our journey was no longer so
far away.
In fact, we never
did quite see that unseen thing. But we felt it. We experienced it. We shared
it. What we once carried in the sacred ark of somewhere else now dwelt within
us. And it was in this way that we became vessels of the holy, carriers of
untold blessings, containers, if not masters, of divinity.
Here is where the
beginning ends. Here is where opening up begins to move us in the infinite
spiral dance out beyond the known and unknown, with something like a song in
our hearts.
