Tomorrow, I’m off again. Which means today I’m doing some of my favorite things – folding clean laundry, making packing lists, deciding which 2 (or 3 or 4) books get to accompany me on the journey, checking things off my lists, creating new music playlists for my Ipod, and compiling travel documents. And thinking about my hopes for the next 3 weeks of travel and time with close friends.
The last couple weeks here in Klaipeda have been a struggle to remain, or to come, awake to my life here. Most days it has been me and the cat lying around the apartment in pajamas until mid-afternoon, when I’ll go for a walk, meet friends for dinner, watch movies, go to the beach. There have been few internal reverberations that echo with God’s voice or His Spirit. I have not been happy about this.
But, one thing I am happy about is that I have felt God’s absence (or as Denise Levertov put it in one of my favorite poems, “not you, Lord, it is I who am absent.”) To feel a lack is to know there should be something to fill that lack.
So, when I think about what my hopes for the next couple weeks are, I know that I want to feel God’s presence rather than His absence. I have two flights, a day in London, 36 hours on a train, and lots of bus hours ahead when I’ll be “alone.” Fortunately, this past year, each time I have traveled from one place to another, I have had a hyper-tangible sense of God going with me and before me. I have found Him in airport prayer chapels and German train stations and customs lines and in the words of fellow travelers on airplanes and in the words of songs accompanying my journey. When I am in these in-between places, I feel held by God.
I know that I am held by God, that He is present, whether I feel it or not. Still, this is one great reason I love travel. It makes actual, tangible what we usually know only metaphorically – that we’re all in-between. We’ve left one place and not yet arrived at our destination. And the only thing to do with the time on that journey is to know the heart of the One leading us.
O Lord, guard my heart,
And guide my steps,
my tongue,
my days.
1 comment:
Jen, thanks for writing so beautifully about your "Journey."
I am here - reading your blog although I don't always respond.
You are doing something I never could and maybe in some way I am having a part in God's work there.
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