Adventuring

When a book finds its way to the right person at the right time in the form of a gift, it can be a beautiful thing. I've been fortunate enough to be the beneficiary of such beauty a number of times in the past several years. The one I'm thinking of now is a book called Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, which my church gave to me for my high school graduation.

It's not a perfect book, but there's one idea I got from it which has stuck with me, that all men have a deep longing for some sort of adventure or epic struggle that is simply not to be tangibly found in the vast majority of lives. (I don't think it addresses whether women have the same desire. The book is written by a man for men, and sticks to what it knows. For me, it's enough to know that I feel it.) I'm tempted to say that it's rarer now than in the past, but I think adventure as we usually think of it has always been the domain of a very small minority. Soldiers find it, I suspect, and rich people can now buy their adventures in a neat package. But for the rest of us, reality is very far from any swashbuckling ideal we may have once held.

As Eldredge writes, the good news is that all of us (men and women) are called to an adventure far more noble and exciting than any mere globetrekking, for we are called to do the will of God. For each one of us He has created a perfect plan, and it's up to us to discover and follow it faithfully. It is one of the keenest pleasures of my youth that I know nothing of what challenges He has prepared for me. It's also, of course, one of the keenest anxieties.

So what's all this about then? Every life then, in its intended course, is a perfect struggle in which the only certainty of the future is that it will eventually bring the sweetest fulfillment. Jacob's life was a pilgrimage, and God was his faithful shepherd. I intend to have such a life.

Tomorrow I'm catching a bus at 6:00 am to London. The next day I'll take another bus to Cardiff, Wales. From there I will travel north through to the northern islands of Scotland, where I will turn around and begin the journey south, arriving home a month after I left. It's a much shorter and wordly pilgrimage than the one I've been speaking of, but the two are inextricably linked in my mind.

For anyone who's interested this is the rough order of my destinations:

London
Cardiff
St. David's
Llanberis
Shrewsbury
Chester
Carlisle
Pitlochry
Stromness
Edinburgh
Durham
York
Edale
Norwich

What this means of course is that whereas my updating thus far has been nothing but persistent neglect, for the next month this blog will be silent. If I'm lucky I'll return with a good story or two, a more sound mind and a more safe heart.

I'll leave you and Brighton with these words from one of my loves, Great Expectations:

We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.