My Unexpected Journey

Sitting around the dining room table, we snacked and sipped our drinks while the conversation had turned to religion. Our book club had read Gregg Allman's "My Cross to Bear" and I have no idea how matters of dogma, faith and purpose rose from it but they had.

"I do think we'll all together in each other's lives for a reason," I said. "I mean the odds of us all ending up together here on Tybee, as friends at a time when we can all really use each other is pretty far fetched otherwise."

"So you believe in predestination," Glenn smiled.

"Oh yeah," I replied. "Whenever I fall down the stairs I get up and say, 'Thank God that's over.'"

Everybody laughed.

I'm not so certain that God picked this particular day for a collection of people who'd recently rearranged everything about their lives to get together. I do think we've each put ourselves in a  position to help the other and that's what we were doing. Whenever people help each other, there's something holy about it.

Thinking back over my life, I've been blessed with people who intensely became a part of me. They were in the right place at the right time for help me move a bit further along in life. Many are now dead, most have moved on somewhere else and a precious few remain constant.

It is funny though. Just a few short years ago, my life centered around work, a particular collection of people and completely a different way of living. But that part of the journey concluded and I suddenly found myself with new friends (some brought back from the dead), a completely different purpose and little about the way I live now resembles what it did then.

I'm stuck by the radical changes I've lived. Sometimes there are things I miss about the old life but I'm pretty focused on living now one day at a time.

"Not all those who wander are lost," Tolkien wrote as two Hobbits set out on a quest to save the world they knew and loved. Before they were done, Frodo and Sam were not the same people and their beloved Shire wasn't the same either.

That's how I think about it these days. I'm on a new and totally unexpected journey though I'm lucky enough, perhaps even blessed, to have these companions, many of who I didn't even know just a short while ago.

Maybe it was all predestined though I don't think so. Even the most scripted of journeys rarely go according to plan. But I do think that God is involved somehow. There is faith in the journey's end and the holiness of this collection of travelers has to be more than mere chance. There are fears that come in the night, goblins and evil people who have left deep scars.

More than these things though, a wonderment fills me as I walk beside these friends on an unexpected journey where it is ourselves we are finding.