If we aren’t careful, life becomes an unending series of false summits.
A few years ago, the prospect of quitting my job was looming over me. It had been a good job with very good people, but it had never centered on the things I loved the most. Meanwhile, on the side, I’d been doing something I did love: writing about music and working with musicians. It had started as a passion project, but over time it had become increasingly profitable.
The two paths were clearly converging from opposite directions, and I was moving toward the point where they’d meet before branching away. I knew I would have a choice to make.
I also knew that I’d already made it.
I lived that last year at my job thinking mostly about quitting my job – visualizing the moment, rehearsing what I might say, wondering how it all might feel. I wasn’t aware of much else around me; I don’t think I lived particularly well. Then it finally happened, like closing a book (the motion was quick but the story stuck with me), and shortly after I was left standing in the spot I’d spent so long looking toward.
I was a little disoriented. But I knew that I needed to make enough money to pay rent, so I picked that objective as the next summit and kept going.
Lately, I’ve been feeling this strange sense of aimlessness.
It’s strange because, on its surface at least, this is a comfortable season for Alli and I. Things are kind of easy. We’ve been in Denver for two and a half years. We love our little church. We’re building meaningful friendships. I’ve been running my own business for a little over a year, and so far nothing has exploded and nobody has come to tell us that we can’t live here anymore (knock on wood). Things are, as far as I can tell, working.
But I’m not sure where I’m going.
The easy answer to this feeling is that I’m longing for somewhere to settle down. Alli and I have spent our marriage moving in and out of apartments across the country; we’re ready to move into a home of our own, ready to be done with graduate school, ready to set a stake down firmly for more than a year or so.
That’s the easy answer. But I don’t think that’s all of it.
I’ve been thinking about that story in the Gospels, the one where a woman in the crowd sneaks up to touch Jesus’ cloak and be healed.
It’s kind of thrown in there, in the midst of these chapters packed with a bunch of busyness for Jesus. He miraculously calms a storm, then sends a legion of demons into a herd of pigs, then returns to Galilee where he’s immediately accosted by a crowd and asked to save a synagogue leader’s sick daughter. If this bit of the Gospels were a television episode (I guess now it is), an editor would’ve pared the plot points down. There are too many to follow.
And then there’s the woman.
Luke writes that she’s been bleeding for twelve years. As a result, she’s almost certainly been ostracized for being perpetually unclean. She’s tried everything to be healed and nothing has worked, and so she’s desperate. But she’s ashamed, too, or maybe she thinks Jesus is too busy, so instead of crying for attention she hides in the crowd to brush his cloak. She does. She’s healed.
And at once, Jesus stops.
He stops.
“Who touched me?” Jesus asks.
Peter (as usual) is confused. “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you,” he says, and you can hear the oh-what-now exasperation in his voice: “Jesus, why are you stopping? Nothing is here. Can’t we get on with it? Don’t you know we have somewhere to be?”
(I imagine Peter was confused and exasperated all the time.)
Here’s the thing: Jesus did have somewhere to be.
He’s just been called to save a sick, dying girl by a pleading father. It’s a high-stakes appointment, and everyone in the crowd is buzzing at it, drawn to the drama of the moment like metal to a magnet. Everyone is flowing forward. But Jesus stops.
There are many beautiful things about Jesus. This is one: His utter unconcern for a schedule.
He’s slow, and as a consequence, present. He is always in demand, but he is always – always – available.
I think maybe we look for peaks by which we can orient ourselves, landmarks to loom over us, mountains we can move toward.
Life requires movement, but movement without direction is meaningless. So we’re in a constant struggle for the high vantage point of purpose, always seeking the place from which we can look down to understand the journey. We hurry breathlessly to chase it, scale it, win it, and always we find it a false peak. We’re only disoriented for a moment, though, because in the distance: “There’s the summit, there.”
And off we go. The appointments are urgent. The stakes are always high.
Jesus knew his purpose.
He didn’t orient himself by false peaks. He lived, instead, in the shadow of Golgotha, drawn steadily by the heaviest and highest calling in history, moving always toward the cross.
And still with time to stop for a woman in the crowd.
