Questing

The best movies are movies that are about discovery.  The ones that send the hero on a quest, typically of insurmountable odds.  The best books are the same.  Questing matters.  Questing reveals us to us, and reveals the reality of the world that we never saw before we left our little corner of it.

I was raised on good stories.  The Hobbit, and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter all set me out on adventures.  But more than that, I was raised on stories from my Mom and Dad, stories about cowboys, medieval knights, and daring adventures.

The world was a quest, and it was glorious.

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It was a paperback, but it was the best Bible that I ever owned.  Terrible translation, fell apart quickly, but immensely important to me.

It was the title that got me.  Truthquest.  A Bible that promises to take you on a quest for truth.  It was what I always wanted and needed.

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Somewhere along the way, the questing stopped.  Life was not an adventure, it was more of a fact.  I went from seeking to knowing, or at least assuming I did.  I became the hobbits of the shire, content to live in a little corner of the world and assume that what I know is what is.

And God got thrown in.  It was inevitable I suppose, treating God like a known commodity when you decide that you are educated.  When you decide that you know...So I had no need to seek Him out.  He was no longer an adventure.

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That Bible, it was the first one I read front to back.  Within it was the first time I discovered the God who filled David, enlightened Solomon, and encouraged Gideon.  Here was the first time I sought God, really and truly.

When I think of adventure I think of that Bible.

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I started reading my Bible straight through in November, feeling it was time to "get my spiritual life together." I am a minister after all, I should be reading that thing more.  I should be doing more praying and doing more studying and being a better Christian.

So I started reading.  It was obligated reading, checking it off my daily list of to-do's.

And then I started to discover adventure again.  As I worked from Genesis into Exodus, and especially into Numbers and Judges, I stopped forcing myself to read, and I started to explore, to seek, to yearn to see what God would do next.

And my life has seemed to become much more mysterious, the world being bigger, the adventure more tangible...life became life again.