You will sometimes hear people complain that our reliance on GPS has led to a collective loss of navigational awareness and that ‘these young people’ can’t even read a map. It’s probably true that GPS technology has degraded some skills that used to be quite necessary. By the way, people were initially quite suspicious of written language as well, sure that it would diminish the ability of people to memorize the sagas that preserved the story of the people. (They were right. Do you know anyone who has memorized the Iliad? Poems like this were once memorized and passed on word-for-word for generations.)
Most of us don’t care about the degradation of map-reading skills. We don’t chastise ourselves for mental laziness because we can’t or won’t memorize turns and landmarks. We want to get from A to B without drama, and our phone or our car’s navigation system does that pretty well.
Most of us, most of the time, just want to get from here to there the best way.
But some of us, sometimes, want to wander.
Sandy and her mom (long before the advent of smart phones) used to get in the car and take a drive, intentionally trying to get lost. Getting lost and wandering aimlessly through country roads was at the heart of their day’s adventure. It the road was unpaved, that was a special bonus!
They didn’t worry about how far they went. They went to see what they could see and to spend time together. Seeing the unplanned and unexpected vistas, the houses and farms, the oddities of yard art, the roadside wild flowers was all they asked. Having the windows down and catching the scent of the forest and the earthy aromas from farms, they spent the day in discovery mode.
When we think of the wilderness wanderings of the ancient Israelites, we often think of it as a time of testing (and failing), and that’s true. We look at it as a time of “not yet” — of longing to get to the Promised Land of blessing, and it was that too.
But it was more; it was a time of discovery. In the wilderness they learned about God and themselves. They learned something about living in community and what God had in mind for them.
Maybe our times of wandering, when we’re not sure where we’re headed, are also opportunities to awaken our senses, to pay attention to both the exterior and interior landscapes.
Time in the wilderness, when we know we haven’t arrived, doesn’t have to feel like wasted time. It can be a time for discovering who we are.
Sometimes, when you don’t know where the road is headed, you can think about what really matters. You can be less concerned with where you’re going and more concerned with who you are becoming.
Lent is the season when we are invited to go into the wilderness on purpose, without a map or a phone or an agenda. To go off the well-worn paths. To travel with our eyes open and the windows down.
Travel expectantly — keen to see what God wants to show you.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets