2023-07-12 A Meditation on the Wanderer

“18 Now when Jesus saw a crowd around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side. 19 And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” 20 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”” (Mt 8:18–20 ESV)

Something of the pluck and courage of your average touring evangelist, your missionary, your frontline soldier of the faith, rains down on the simple and sincere people whom they encounter. The one, the soldier, homeless or sheltered in tents and ships, airfields and barracks, complicit in a wondrous Call: urgency, fighting posture, gifted insight unto society’s coalescent ills, the bland affections and reliances, the lazy fixation on what cannot save. Thus, Israel took time out each year to live in tents (Lev 23:42). Thus, we do not see the soldier’s, the missionary’s, walk as somehow a higher ideal, only as a mixture of what is regrettable—the need to fight and put up signs of strength—and what is noble. It is a found nobility, strength for those inclined to hear us for who—and what—we are.

For the will of the missionary and the soldier of faith is sacrosanct, pleading, vulnerable; it bears with it an invite to join up, to fight the same fight, no coercion or physical manipulation capable quite of talking to the inner man and woman. For that, faith and service is needed. For that, we address—from our homeless perch—each citizen of native or foreign land, as a weaned child, hoping for a sign from Above, and receiving it in that makeshift city of tents, gone in a whisper or pulse or moment. For our Cause is accomplished here when we’ve been that distant city on a hill, we’ve been Grace to people thirsty, genuinely smiling at us for what we’ve patiently held up as Holy. We’ve held up a purpose, a place to belong, a rest stop, for a society ill and fought over, disputed territories and clans, ethnic rivalries more fanciful and wonderful than our best simulations and models.

Our brains then rely on deeper instinct, rather, on inspiration, as being the maker of this voice or that spirit. The one who has a tender grasp, a child’s fascination, an academic’s long study, a census taker’s efficiency, yet a Christian’s faith that no matter the numbers of living and dying, of saved and unevangelized, God is carried onwards from the womb of Woman, in His state as Reason and Discipler of Man, to inspire what dreams we are licensed henceforth to entertain: on some future date, all things—we scarcely can contain ourselves—shall work together for good. And the first, the leading cause to fight for, is some agreement forged in the heavens of our minds, as to what repentance and faith is getting up to these days. What can be learned from a heart alive with external inspiration, post-conviction? With the knowledge it is no longer on tenterhooks and precipice most cautious and frightful, but invited fully to thrive and flourish. For, our instincts turn to goodness.

So to that homeless friend: carry on the radical Cause, but don’t use your estate as a tent-dweller to bless sin. Rather, let yourself be that voice worth hearing, sensitive to its own temptations and sins. God will humble, and God will redeem. God will prod into the fruits of a post-hungry soul, the winning mindset, and now if only you would share it.