Into the Unknown
Into the Unknown
Lord, I will trust You,
help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Sitting at a table with students for a weekly Tuesday community meal, I pull back to watch and listen. Students laugh over puns, celebrate successful projects and interviews, and share favorite movies and television shows. Individuals get up for second helpings and make space for late arrivals. Every year the students change a bit, but the dinners remain. It’s a place of calm and comfort in often harried weeks, a family away from home during graduate school.
Yet, something didn’t fit during an early week in the fall semester. I enjoyed seeing the students connecting with one another, but was this enough? Heading into the academic year, I had been focused on the usual work of putting together the schedule for the semester with names of speakers and meal hosts filled in from August to December. Once these tasks were done I could relax. However, I started to feel uncomfortable with that comfort. The familiar is soothing, but after a while it can become stifling. Sitting at that table, I felt lulled into complacency. Let’s fill up the calendar, let’s keep meeting, but what else? Was there a larger vision? Could these be God’s proddings to journey beyond the familiar in ministry and other places?
Though the images of journey and pilgrimage drive a lot of my work, it’s often because I like the idea, not always the reality of journey. So I deconstruct the elements of pilgrimage—story, liminal space, community—and seek to put them into models I think can be controlled. Safe, fenced in spaces. Gather a handful of students that get the ministry and aren’t messy. Develop a story that offers students one way to gather in small groups. As I seek to control the process, no wonder I’m starting to see the spaces I’ve created as a bit stale. I haven’t been looking for, and sometimes even making space for, those unforeseen transformational moments that can occur on a journey where trusting God is at the center.
This feeling of discomfort with comfort goes beyond my work in campus ministry. These past years since my mother’s death have been ones of nesting. I’ve been seeking to find and create a safe place since life has felt upended. If I don’t have the stability of my mother, I can at least have a house with everything as I want it so there are places to rest, read, and reflect. Places to be safe. This isn’t a bad thing, but it may have lulled me into a way of life that puts my trust in an ability to create a stable environment instead of trusting God. Several red flags have been alerting me that this might be the case.
I’ve curtailed travel, except for work trips and a couple of visits to family because I don’t want to be away from home and my weekly routines there.
I continue to edit this book I’ve been at for years. Even though most of the structure and content is finished, I’ve put off looking for a publisher or seeking places to share my ideas.
Outings with friends and others usually have very clear and deep boundaries and only take place occasionally.
If I’m honest, much of this response to life is about trusting the structures I can create and control—whether a weekly meal with students or a home that I put in order. Yet, something is missing. There’s always the fear that if any of these things falls apart I won’t know what to do and will be lost. Still I keep trying to be in control.
In contrast, these initial lines from Brendan’s litany from Celtic Daily Prayer reveal a connection between trusting God and being open to the unknown.
Lord, I will trust You, help me to journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown.
If it’s just seeking the unknown for its own sake, then I would say stay on the well-trod path. However, if it’s the unknown of Abraham traveling from Haran or Ruth traveling to Bethlehem—trusting God, listening to God, being with God’s people—then I want to step out and go. Not in order to find a place to be safe, but to live a life of walking with God.
I’m not ready to run ahead on a journey with an unknown end. My breath catches when I think about leaving the familiar, but now there’s this prodding whisper to look into the unknown with God. Though my feet may not be ready, I can pray that my hands and heart may unclasp the self-made safety nets and that my body will be ready to sit at unfamiliar tables in the near future.
