We Are Wanderers

A nomad wanders, finding a new home based on the changing of seasons.

I’m catching a tiny glimpse of that here– we’ve come to settle for just a month in a town that’s not our home, though we’re settled with sweet family.

Things have indeed been stripped away, and I still feel the ache of losing a house where furniture aged with our children; where floors sagged and walls stood, adoring the life that pulsed around them.

I’m a descriptive, image-driven person, and since all I can picture of our new place is a floor plan, I’m clinging to it for dear life, arranging our furniture in its virtual rooms for perfect fit.

There’s a train track yards away from the house and we hear the boom of the train, the click of its wheels as it chugs past. And Eliot, like his cousins before him, rushes to the window or out the door to see it.

Years ago, that same track may have indeed brought wanderers to this old house where my in-laws now live. Wanderers who stayed a short while and then moved on.

We have trekked into a season of quiet rest before we dive into a totally new experience in an unknown city.

And while many people wander for different reasons, I think we wander in search of something, that some goal shines at the end of our tunnel.

JRR Tolkien wrote, “Not all who wander are lost.”

And King David said,

“Oh, that I had wings like a dove!

I would fly away and be at rest;

yes, I would wander far away;

I would lodge in the wilderness;

I would hurry to find a shelter

from the raging wind and tempest.”

My prayer here is that we find God, the God of the wanderer– the God who led Abram into Abraham, the God who walked Noah through the storm. Indeed, He’s faithful in all things, and indeed, He’ll restore order where it’s been lost.

The nomad clings to the promise of food for his family.

The wanderer clings to the hope of a future, secured.

And I’m clinging to the images of home fulfilled, the adventure of newness ahead that promises to never be boring or useless, but always full of all things to learn and nothing to lose.