Looking for the Way

I got lost on my way to school last Tuesday. The trip didn't have the best of beginnings -- there was yet another financial crisis that I was trying to communicate with the right balance of seriousness without a tone of impending doom. Not an easy task, especially so, since I was feeling a little under the weather. So, I walked out the door late and it was already dark. Not a good thing.

So, I was working my way to school and being lost in thought and suddenly realized it wasn't just in the figurative sense that I was lost. I was truly lost. I had missed my turn and was in uncharted territory. Now, round home, that's no big deal. If you know you need to go north and east, you just grab the next road to the north and east and you're good to go. Not so in urban areas fraught with one-way roads, cul de sacs and roads that wind all over the place and dump you off in areas you had no idea existed.

Eventually, I found my way back to a road that I was familiar with only to lose my way again...and again. It slowly dawned on me that I was truly not well, in the dark, in an area I'd never been before and dangerously late for class. I had lost my way on so many levels. Yet, even when the thought occurred to me, the irony was not lost on me. Here I was on my way to seminary for a class on the Older Testament where I felt lost, at a school that seemed to be diverting me from the way I thought I was supposed to go, and I felt utterly in the dark.

So here's the difference. While I was actually feeling a sense of dread and panic about my experience behind the wheel, realizing that I was in such a fevered state that asking for directions and being able to track them was utterly useless, I didn't really feel all that worked up about the complete inability to articulate what in God's name I thought I was doing on a vocational level. Am I in peril of not actually passing my OT class. Well, yeah. Does that leave me in a panic? Financially, it could be a real drag, but metaphysically, yeah well...whatever. I'm no more clueless than a lot of the people who thump their Bibles without having any better idea of what's contained within its covers. I guess on that level, The Way might have to come looking for me -- I've decided to pull over and blow bubbles in the park. At least for now. I can get back on that road when the traffic and other distractions has subsided somewhat. The destination's still there, but I temporarily forgot that part of the trip is the sightseeing.

So what happened literally? The practical part of me prevailed. I decided that if I kept going north, I was eventually going to hit the interstate and could take it one exit up and get to class from that direction. I was one minute late and drenched in sweat (more from the fever than anything else). On the plus side, my instructor was five minutes late, so you could say I was actually early. I drank plenty of fluids and managed to find my way home after class feeling a little shaky but never veered from the right road.

I'm sure that in my spiritual journey there could be some easier paths that would get me to my destination with less fuss, not unlike heading north to the interstate, but I don't really care to go that route. I could have done that years ago -- in broad day light.