Pilot Me

Josh Garrels has an an album called "Love and War and the Sea in Between,"and it's full of all these incredibly rich lyrics about journey and earth and the depths of the human soul. If you've never listened to it, you really should. He's an artist in the fullest sense of the world. It will absolutely arrest you.

I think my life lately has seemed very much like a journey, a physical journey, with like ancient trees and mountains and clouds that are not whizzing by like I'm in an airplane but creeping by like I'm walking. It's sometimes tempting to go through life trying to find meaning "out there" - looking to the sky, the future, the steeples of the churches, the fixtures of the journey that feel more permanent than us. That's idolatry.

The sun and the moon and the paths we walk are all created, like us. They are our sisters and brothers. They are not our parents. But we should not ignore them. Meaning isn't found in the DNA but in the relationship it has with the One who spoke it to life, and so the most important thing is to get connected. Who cares what terrain you're moving through, as long as you're connected.

When I go trail running most days I cannot foresee the experience. Every day will feel and look different. The air has a whole infinite range of humidity, of temperature, of movement and smell and texture. The plants might trap the heat in close to the ground or they might shade me from the sun. The river might sound like a waterfall or it might be dry, and maybe the bugs are out or the squirrels try to trip me. Some days I can run 20 miles and some days I can squeeze out 11, because maybe there are a lot of hills and rocks or possibly my brain gets bored of the trail.

Doesn't matter. It's a journey just the same.

I think it's about paying attention. My friend Doug says since our bodies are all wrapped up in connective tissue, if we just pay enough attention we can feel our breath in our toes. I don't know about you, but I can't feel that. I just think about it as a good metaphor for life. We walk our own journeys and there's so much more to life than we've been told - there's something a lot deeper - but we're too isolated to feel it. When all our walking is over and we reach the destination I think we'll find there's no more separation between us. That's what heaven means. We'll all be one with each other and with the One who made us. Even the trees and the birds. We all started as a thought in one Mind, and in the end we will be together again.

Donald Miller writes about beauty and how the human instinct upon beholding beauty is to consume it. Like, eat it or something. I'm not kidding. Moms talk about wanting to "just gobble up" their little babies all the time. We try to contain sunsets in pictures because we can't just watch them. We have to capture them. We have to bottle them up and take them with us in our pockets. We want beauty to be a part of us. We want to own it, be it, contain it.

I think that's why babies put everything in their mouths, and why I can't help but reach out and pick wildflowers. It's why I close my eyes really fast and firm when I see something beautiful, like a shutter closing on a camera, capturing it in my memory. It's because we used to be one with beauty, one with all of the gorgeous creation, but we ended up in isolation.

You might think I'm going crazy, that I've spent too much time alone in the woods, or too much time alone in general. But if you throw me out you have to throw out the writers of Genesis and Revelation too. They say we begin and end all together, in a great big garden.

And the trick is the journey back to it.

I will arise and follow you over

Savior please, pilot me

Over the waves and through every sorrow

Savior please, pilot me

When I have no more strength left to follow

Fall on my knees, pilot me

May your sun rise and lead me on

Over the seas, Savior pilot me

Pilot Me by Josh Garrels