Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost : )

Before I left for Slovakia, someone gave me a book with quotes about travel and service.


I've paged through this book many times, and these are the quotes that have resonated most with me during my time overseas:

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Martin Buber

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
The Talmud


The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in life-work in which they find no pleasure or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realizing that they have spent the only years that they are ever going to get in this world doing something which could not matter less to themselves or to anyone else... We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling, perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.
Fredrick Buechner, The Hungering Dark





There are some days when no matter what I say it feels like I'm far away in another country and whoever is doing the translating has had far too much to drink.
Brian Andres, Storypeople

Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable but it is always invigorating.
Michael Crichton


I also thought I would share with you an excerpt about my service abroad from the autobiographical faith statement I wrote for the North Carolina synod:

The time I have spent abroad has been formative. I have been stretched, broken, challenged, and filled by the relationships and service that I have experienced in Slovakia and Peru. I have a new found awareness of who my neighbor is. I have seen the Gospel lived out in a small Slovak town with just as many sheep as people, and I have witnessed acts of self-giving love in the dusty desert of Alto Cayma. I have grown both in confidence and in humility, in faith and in grace. I believe that through the people I have been God has been hard at work shaping me.


And one last quote:

And at the end of all our exploring, we will arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.
TS Eliot, Little Gidding