KristyWes

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

“A pilgrim must be a child who can approach everything with an attitude of wonder, awe and faith. Pray for wonder, awe, desire. Ask God to take away your sophistication and cynicism. Ask God to take away the restless, anxious heart of the tourist, which always needs to find the new, the more, the curious…


We go on pilgrimage so we can go back home and know that we never need to go on pilgrimage again. Pilgrimage has achieved its purpose when we can see God in our everyday and ordinary lives.”

-- Richard Rohr

I confess to a restless, anxious tourist heart. Big time. As I approach the one-year mark of living in my current apartment, I long for change. Time to go! Keep moving! Time to seek out a new apartment, new neighborhood, new experience.

Often I try to justify my restlessness as being merely a healthy desire to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (to borrow a phrase from Thoreau). Try everything once, leave no experience un-experienced, seek out the other and get familiar with it, know a little something-something about everything. Other times I paint it romantic, call it “wanderlust” and pretend it makes me adventurous.

Either way, that quote above from Richard Rohr reminds me that the end to my restlessness does not lie in the new, the latest thing, but in God himself.

On a related note, last night I returned to my apartment to inspect the exterminator’s aftermath. My roommate and I suspected we had a minor bed-bug infestation (NYC – you gross me OUT sometimes!), so we called The Man with the Chemicals to come and set things right. He worked his chemical-magic during the day, and when I got home I saw just how thorough a job he had done.

My furniture had been upended in the exterminator’s quest to leave no bed-bug hiding spot un-sprayed. Drawers were yanked out and stacked far from the dresser frame. My mattress leaned on the wall opposite from the box spring, and the bed frame was pulled apart. Pictures and posters that had hung on the wall when I left in the morning were now stacked precariously on a table. Faced with chaos to clean, not to mention 5+ loads of laundry in order to get the chemical stench off my linens and clothes, this would have been the perfect time for a pity party. (I’ve been a champion pity-party thrower lately, too.)

But God must have doused me with some of that peace that passes all human understanding. (Do you know that peace? When it finds me, it’s like a matter-of-fact deep-breath other-worldly “So what? God’s got me” confidence.) I surveyed the mess, determined that it would be just as easy to completely rearrange everything as to put it back to its original spot, climbed over the bookcase blocking my door and got to work. Many hours later my room had a whole new look that I was kinda jazzed about.

No, it’s not a new apartment, not a new neighborhood, not a new country. Just the same old furniture in a slightly new pattern. But it was enough to satisfy my desire for change, and I give credit to God, who allowed bed-bugs to bring about the exterminator who brought about chaos, which brought the opportunity and occasion for re-ordering. So thanks! to God – who is, as always, my great Re-Orderer.