The certain way to miss your destination is not to have one.
That's the tone the conversation with the family took recently.
When the ship is without a heading, you can be assured that you will not reach it.
I delight in deep discussion and truly loathe small talk. So I am thankful for the loves who quarry the depths with me. Deeply thankful. Yet I digress.
When the ship is without a heading, the voyage is robbed even of the chance for success. There's no definition of it, no measure for it. It is nondescript and therefore unobtainable.
When the ship is without a heading, the best to be hoped for is pleasantly lost.
When the ship is without a heading.
That word plays a bit in my mind tonight.
The heading. The coordinates that clearly define the desired end. The exact location where you intend to arrive. The one point that all must move towards. The heading.
Where am I heading?
If ever I do teach teenagers (as I hope to) about all of the things they don't tell you about being a young adult, I think this one would have to top the list: there comes a moment when you are not just expected to steer or to navigate. There comes a moment where it is left to you to chart the course. To set, not just sail towards, the mark.
There comes a day when the heading is asked of you.
Where are you heading?
In youth, this is all simplicity. Heading to grandma's house because that's where we go on Christmas. Heading to recess because that's what we do after lunch. Heading to middle school because that's what follows elementary school. And so to high school. And so to college. And then...
Where am I heading?
The farther I get away from the predetermined course, the deeper in the woods and the farther from the path, the more two things happen simultaneously.
First, I feel dwarfed by the open space, insufficient to the task of determining the course with the wide world laid before me. I feel inadequate to determine the heading. How should I know?
And then, most inexplicably, I feel grateful that the heading is not being chosen for me. That I am no longer riding the conveyor belt being taken where the world thinks I should go. Because, after all, why should the proper directing of my life's course be left to them? How should they know?
And so to the page tonight. Very largely because I have been away from the page for so very long.
And somewhat for the need to state a simple truth.
I do not know where I am heading.
Perhaps a foolish confession to make; certainly the bit of honesty we most often aim to conceal.
But truth nonetheless: I do not know where I am heading.
I know that God is truly the One who directs my days. I know and find comfort in the assurance that He holds my tomorrows. I know that life's greatest object is to love and follow Him. I know. My heart knows and is at rest in all these things.
And yet there is something of knowing where to work and when to quit; where to serve and how long to stay; who to walk with and who to part from; who to be and who to be free of - this whole toward and away - this constant journey quality of the time-riddled world in which we live that is very like being in open sea and very much without a map.
I love Him and I trust Him. But I seldom know just what He is about in all these strange every days.
And there's something of me being left to the fine details, to determine the practicality. And in all of that - that grit of free will meeting Diving providence - that place where it's a dance, not a Dictatorship - in that place, I don't really know where I'm heading.
And I wonder, is that true of you too?
