The Point of a Journey Is Not to Arrive
The truth is, even though I intimately embraced this song's message since I did my IB English presentation on it in 2014, I never truly understood what it meant until now. For far too long, the industrialized school system taught me and the rest of my peers to be obsessed with the outcome—the grades I got, the college I would get into, the internship or job I could land, the money I could accrue, and the status that I could attain. I've spent too many years in my life just following directions because the promise was, if I could follow directions and follow what everyone else was doing, I would be rewarded with a good life. The problem is all too often that the system doesn't accommodate those who deviate from the path, who, somewhere along their journey, realize that something went awry and that something doesn't feel quite right, so we never receive those promises.
In the same way, the once-emotionally traumatizing slog I went through in high school and college to figure out what my life purpose was and how to live out a genuine Christian life, was characterized by an obsession with an outcome. This obsession with an outcome—what I now of course realize is an idealized version of a Christian defined by social norms of the institutional church and contemporary cultural standards—ultimately plagued my emotional and spiritual life for about five grueling, miserable years.
Perhaps we're all wrong about the Christian life—maybe we're missing the entire point when we wait for blessings to come, when we obsess over heaven or hell, when we flaunt our accomplishments in the church or how much theological knowledge we've attained, when we stand around waiting for Jesus' return, when we constantly fixate on each and every possible reward or punishment. Those things neither constitute the point of the journey. It could be that the practice, as Seth Godin argues, is the driving force behind the change we all desperately want to bring to the world. It is the kind of generosity and compassion, the kind of attention and care and genuine desire to understand, a daily contribution to those around us and thus humanity as a whole. It could be that this is what ultimately gives us that "sense of Your calling."
It might just be the greatest lesson I've learned in my life so far—realizing that what I needed wasn't a specific outcome, it was just being able to live in the moment, to spread kindness in our world, to the see genuine happiness and joy I could bring to people,
