The church I served in Connecticut had a youth program called Journey to Adulthood. It is a wonderful program that recognizes that young people are on a trip, an adventure, through adolescence that leads toward adulthood. It recognizes that their lives are not static. They are passing through important transitions and facing many changes as they move from childhood into adulthood.
The program also recognizes that these transitions can be scary, both for young people and for their parents. So, it seeks to create a community that offers support to both, as they make that journey through childhood and through the great change into adulthood. I have wonderful memories of walking alongside the young people of that parish as they made their journey to adulthood.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if we should have a program for adults as well, something called Journey through Adulthood. It can be easy to think that once we have made the journey through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, we have made it. We have reached the end of the journey. We have arrived.
I can only speak for myself, but that is not what my life’s journey has been like at all.
Obviously, I made the journey into adulthood, all the way to middle age. However, I do not know about you, but I have never reached a destination called “adulthood.” I have reached plateaus—places where I could rest for a while—but those have never been places where I could stay very long. Eventually, some transition, some life event, some change comes along that compels me to move off the plateau where I have been resting and pushes me farther along the path that is my life.
It seems to me that to be human is to be continually on a journey—not a journey into places that are familiar, but a continual journey into the unknown. Just when you think you have this whole business of being an adult figured out, something comes along and challenges your understanding and your way of seeing the world. Becoming a parent, for example, changed everything for me. Caring for aging parents can do the same. Life is a continual process of being called out of the known and into the unknown.
It seems to me that, although we want God to call us out of the wilderness, out of the unknown, and into the known, God often does the reverse. To be human is to be on a journey deeper and deeper into the wilderness, deeper and deeper into the unknown.
Think about it for a moment. The end of our journey on this planet is death—and that is the greatest unknown of all. We have been promised that this is not all there is. We have been promised that death is not the end. But the details of what comes next have been kept from us. They remain unknown. God calls us to continue our journey into the unknown, trusting in the promise that this journey leads to life.
It is into this kind of unknown journey that God calls Abram and Sarai. God is pretty vague with Abram: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” And then scripture simply says: “So Abram went.”
God does not tell Abram and Sarai how to do this. He does not give them many details at all. God simply says, “Go.”
And remember: Abram and Sarai are old. They are past the age when they could expect to have children. The promise is outrageous, and the journey makes no sense. Leave everything, they have ever known in their old age for a promise that seems impossible? Yes. That is exactly what they are called to do.
Now, Abram and Sarai are often depicted as people of great and perfect faith. They did have great faith, but it was not perfect. They stumble many times along the journey. Abram denies that Sarai is his wife in order to protect himself. Sarai laughs when she hears that she will have a child in her old age. These are not perfect human beings.
They are human beings who get up each morning, put one foot in front of the other, and do the best they can to follow faithfully a God who calls them not to an easy life or a predictable life, but to a full life that leads into the unknown. God called Abram and Sarai to take risks, embrace change, and walk into the wilderness. He did not call them to be perfect people who get everything right all the time. He called them to be people willing to take the journey, willing to trust that they were part of something bigger—part of God’s plan.
And so, it is for us. We are all on a journey. It begins the day we are born and does not end until we die. Throughout that journey, we are not being called to be perfect. We are not being called to get everything right all the time. We are being called to get up each and every morning and trust God’s promises. We are called to put one foot in front of the other and to move into the unknown when God calls us to do so. We are called to take risks and to embrace change.
And I know this goes against all our human inclinations. We so much want to follow a God who calls us from the unknown into the known. We so much want God to show us what comes next, or to let us stay where we are without any change. But that is not the journey we are on.
Even when we try to keep ourselves on the plateau, even when we try to keep change from happening in our lives, it comes anyway. A child is born. A job is lost. A child grows up. A spouse dies. A family home burns down. A spouse leaves. Our health declines. We grow older. The list could go on and on.
For me, the good news in the story of Abram and Sarai is this: in spite of our frequent failings, in spite of our fear of the unknown, in spite of not knowing what we are doing much of the time, God is with us. That is the promise of the story of Abram and Sarai. God is with us as we journey from one unknown to another throughout our lives.
We may not be called to literally leave our people and our families, as Abram and Sarai were called to do, but we are called over and over again to journey forward into the unknown.
So, during this season of Lent, go forth into the wilderness, into the unknown. Dare to trust in God’s greater vision for your life, even when you do not fully understand what that vision is. Trust God’s call to you, knowing that you are blessed, just as Abram and Sarai were blessed. Embrace the journey that is your life, even when it is a journey into the unknown.
For the unknown can never be entirely wilderness when God is present with us, because when God is present with us, we are always at home.
