On Wandering

There are a lot of people in the Bible who did a lot of wandering. They packed up their bags (if there was time), and set off for a new … what? A new place? A new beginning? A new life? Sometimes wandering is not knowing your destination, other times it is not knowing how to get there. In its most frustrating, soul-searching form, it is both.

And what is most fascinating to me is that the in every case I can remember of Biblical wandering, the wanderer was not lost at all, but was led. I’m finding that being led through wanderings does not always involve a pillar of cloud and of fire; sometimes it is the following after the faintest whisper, a wisp of smoke drifting on the wind. Sometimes it feels like following nothing at all, but does that negate the presence of The Leader?

I think in today’s world of GPS and digital maps, search engines and WiFi, we are afraid of wandering. To admit wandering is to admit an unknown; as I said, an unknown destination or an unknown path of finding it. There is nothing our current society loves more than to stamp out an unknown, so to hold an “unknown” in your hands or your heart is in itself seen as a sign of weakness. In a world where knowledge is key, why would anyone chose to admit an unknown, let alone lean into it? But as the great JRR Tolkien said, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

To be “lost” is to admit defeat, a state of being, it has even an air of finality. There is no process of being “lost”. You are or you aren’t. But to wander … that is a journey. And even if prefer to think that our tidy little worlds are perfectly planned and orchestrated and structured and known, the journeys we are each on are dictated by the unknown. It is the unknown person who walks into our life and never leaves, or the person who we thought we knew who walks away, the unexpected diagnosis, the sudden loss, the surprise news … despite all of our “knowns” and our comfort in knowing them, is the unknowns that truly shape our lives. And isn’t there a sort of profound beauty in that? We wander through these unknowns, get our bearings, find ourselves a little more, then begin wandering again — a little wiser, a little less self-assured, a little more aware of the beauty of the journey.

What if instead of frantically scrambling for solid ground in the midst of the unknowns, we leaned into the wandering? What would we learn? How would we grow? What would we have otherwise missed? I think there are things to take away from these wanderings that no amount of Googling or higher education can teach us.