Wandering in Place: Finding God Experientially

“I went with nothing, nothing but the thought of you…I went with nothing, but the thought you’d be there too…I went wandering.”

-Johnny Cash-

“Not all who wander are lost…”

-John Ronald Reuel Tolkien-

“I went wandering.” These words, so aptly phrased by America’s Prophet, are also an apt description of the past six months of my life. I’ve been wandering, looking for something that I couldn’t find where I was. I couldn’t find it in church, I couldn’t find it in school, I couldn’t find it in my own country. And so I wandered. Like the Prophet, I also went with the thought that someone would be where I was going; and I found him in the oddest places.

I found him through the inky streets of Prague, amidst the cold narrowness of Dublin, and atop the steps of the Barcelona’s Museo de Catalunia, watching the city awaken with the sunset. I found him where our world met the water, through the stuttering ruins of Biloxi, Mississippi. I walked with him along the black sand shores of the Lost Coast in northern California, and on the blinding wind- and snow-swept roads of Wyoming, I prayed that he’d bring me safely to their end.

But not just places: people, too. In the warmth of the family of God, oddly flourishing in “post-Christian” London. In the fellowship of a best friend, such a welcome respite on roads that could have been so lonely.

In a parking lot in Humbolt County, I found him in the sunken, penetrating eyes of a homeless man I’ll call Micah. Micah was a prophet, or so he told me. And he kind of looked like one. He was wild, messy, decidedly un-Christian to the naked eye. A nasty case of meth mouth had left his teeth cracked and broken beyond repair, but the self-deprecation that eludes his materially advantaged countrymen drew my attention to more important things, things the naked eye doesn’t usually see. Intelligence that shouldn’t reside in the mind of a man who’s hitched rides for a living through the past 16 years blazed from those deeply set eyes. We shared God over a Pall Mall, and when our conversation turned to who Jesus Christ was, he gave the textbook answer that 3 years of Biblical studies drove into my mind but not my heart. I couldn’t believe it.

Finding what I wandered for in such surprising people and places shouldn’t really have surprised me. The One I wandered for promised such incongruity when He spoke of the kingdom that’s almost here, the hidden kingdom constantly working towards the day when the invisible is made visible and His glory is finally, fully, apparent. “A little while longer and the world will see Me no more, but you will see Me. Because I live, you will live also.”1 He doesn’t promise anything easy, like this is some cosmically rewarding game of hide and seek. He just promises life.

Life that eludes us all too often in a world where there are no more frontiers, where nothing remains to be tamed or discovered or invented. Where Jesus Christ is made the center of lectures and classes, but rarely experiences. And where answers come easy, but wandering comes hard.

To be honest, finding God experientially isn’t something we excel at as a culture. Instead, we tend to try creating experiences designed to contain Him, boxes to fill Him with. God doesn’t need boxes: He made the world for a reason.

And it takes a whole new set of naked eyes to really see Him in this world, boxes or not. New eyes, and a scary openness to results that might crack, even break, the mold He’s fit so comfortably into for so long. I’ve been conditioned to believe that I shouldn’t find God in the eyes of a homeless ex-meth addict, that wandering is pointless, “unwise”, an irresponsible waste of time. That experiential knowledge of the Most High is to be distrusted.

But for me, wandering has been a much different sort of experiential knowledge, a different sort of experience. It’s different from the experiences created in a building as the sum of an equation involving mood lighting, a casual dress code, and the right combination of chord progressions. It’s harder than those, much harder. New eyes require hardness, they require change. A change of scenery, maybe; a change of attitude, usually; a change of heart, always. They wouldn’t be new if we were already born with them, and so growing and strengthening them becomes a process. Like wandering.

As I finally “settle down” for my last semester of college, trading the unknown adventures of the road for an internship and the security of a warm bed at night, I realize something important, something new. I’ll find Him here, too. Wandering doesn’t always have to travel; I can wander in one place. God’s not some spiritual tourist attraction that requires a plane ticket to Prague to experience in a new way. New eyes can open you to the stationary as much as the transitory, regardless of location. I can find God settled in the same place just as well as I can abroad, roaming His world. Sure, a change of scenery does the heart good, but a change of heart does the soul one better. Hardship can be found in “settling down”, you just have to practice using that new set of eyes to see it. It’s a process. Like wandering.