One of my earliest memories is of my dad in a Triumph convertible steering with his knees as we wound our way down some twisty road. I don't know if it was in Salinas, California or Nashville, Tennessee or someplace else. We rode in the car a lot, particularly during moves between one west coast naval station and another east coast base. I especially remember not quite being big enough to see out the windows.
For the last five years, I have been on a road through seminary, hitting the occasional pothole or the hazard of an unmarked turn or a sudden obstacle, but also enjoying the long straightaways. I know without looking at any odometer or official record that I have covered a lot of miles.
It would be easy to take this road and stick to the expressway, but like small towns forgotten in the shadow of the interstate or beltway, there are places I'd have hated to bypass. The most direct route between two points may be a straight line, but there's a whole lot of world to experience in the margins and hidden in backstreets and alleys.
It would be easy to name some of the people with whom I've traveled, but when I stop and think about the number of people who have traveled with me for not only a a period of months or years but even a morning or an afternoon, that list probably cannot be written because I'd never be able to name every person who has prayed for me and my ministry, for my family, or for the congregations where I have served or the seminary and professors who have guided my education.
What's even more challenging is to imagine, like a route yet planned or taken, where this road leads. I don't believe for a minute that it ends with my degree completion in December. That's just one wayside on an even longer road.
The prayer I keep with me in this unknowing is from the Lutheran Book of Worship:
Lord God,
you have called your servants
to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
by paths as yet untrodden,
through perils unknown.
Give us faith to go out with good courage,
not knowing where we go,
but only that your hand is leading us
and your love supporting us;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
