wanderer

Are you following Jesus? I want you to look at yourself and ask that question. Are you a follower? Am I? Often, we are more wanderers than followers. I am speaking of myself as much as of you. We are people who run around a lot, do many things, meet many people, attend many events, read many books. We are very involved. We experience life as many, many things. We go here, we go there, we do this, we do that, we speak to him, we speak to her, we have this to do and that to do. Sometimes we wonder how we can do it all. If we sit down and think about it, we are often running from one emergency to another. We are so busy and so involved. Yet if we are asked what we are so busy with we don’t really know. People who wander from one thing to the other, feeling that they are lived more than they live, are very tired. Deeply tired. It is a problem for many people. It is not so much that we do many things but rather that we do many things while wondering whether anything is happening.

seems as though we have all these balls up in the air and wonder how we can keep them all going. It is very tiring. Exhausting actually. Some people finally stop and give it all up. They say, “It was five years and nothing happened anyway.” They sit there and do nothing. Nothing excites them anymore. They have no real interest in life. They just watch television, read comic books, and sleep all the time. There is no rhythm, no movement, no tension. Sometimes there is escape through alcohol, drugs, or sex, but nothing fascinates them. Nothing energizes them. “What do you want to do?” “I don’t care.” “Want to go to a movie?” “I don’t care.” They have moved from wandering to just sitting there. These people are also very tired. There is a real fatigue there. Both types of people, the running-around ones and the just-sitting-there ones, are not moving anywhere. There is something of the wanderer and something of the person who just sits there in all of us. If you look at this world you might think, “I am so tired. There is so much fatigue, so much experience of heaviness in this world.

It is into this deeply tired world of ours that God sends Jesus to speak the voice of love. Jesus says, “Follow me. Don’t keep running around. Follow me. Don’t just sit there. Follow me.” The voice of love is the voice that can completely reshape our life from a wandering or just-sitting-there life to one that is focused and has a point to go to. “Follow me.” Some of us may have heard this voice already. Others not.