Taking the First Step

A journey is a baffling thing. You start somewhere and end up somewhere, yet you can only occupy the space you are presently in. A journey, like a song, has a particularly elusive kind of being. Unlike a painting, or a barbecue grill, or a glass of water, a journey has no particular point at which one can say, "see, this is my journey" because it exists as an event flowing through time. You can't pick up a song and show it to someone. The only way to share the experience is to play it for them, which requires stopping, listening, and feeling the music with undivided attention.

Unfortunately, a journey is not a song, either. At least, not a recorded song that can be replicated time and time again in nearly the same way. After days of travel, you find yourself a changed person standing in a new place and to replicate the spontaneity, difficulties, and discoveries of a particular journey is not humanly possible.

I think the journey analogy is quite apt when talking about faith. To think of my days hating and memorizing  Bible verses in a musty Baptist classroom, or praying a fearful prayer of repentance to gain salvation, or growing close to other boys my age after living in a cabin for a week, or seeing Jesus' love for the poor and broken jump out from the Bible for the first time, or through friends who have loved and changed me, I cannot think of a way to systematize my experience and present it in a neat and orderly fashion to help guide others on that same path.

Simply put, I'm not in the same place I started in. Much of my journey I look back on with bitterness and contempt, even though it was all part of the journey and no parts were any less essential, I still take parts of the journey personally as things I would never wish on others. The pain and anger I have toward those parts, especially the fundamentalist parts, has often led me to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That being said, this blog is going to be my attempt to go back and find that baby. I'm doing this blog as an exercise to find the God I love and find out how I can bring something like the gospel to the students I serve as a youth director. Wish me luck!