Sam Bush, “Life is Not a Journey”
What is the best metaphor for life? Is it a box of chocolates? A highway? A roller coaster? A dance? Each of those images illustrates what it means to be a person and all the twists, and turns that come with life. The metaphor du jour is that life is a journey. The journey has been a familiar allegory from Homer’s Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz. Journeys have the same ingredients as any good story: conflict, resolution, feelings of lostness, unexpected surprises and, perhaps most importantly, a destination.
But, today, everywhere you look, celebrities and influencers are eager to walk you through their journeys. There is a journey for everybody, whether it’s for sobriety, grief or changing your hair (not exactly a perilous journey). Our modern use of the word first came from an essay titled “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who famously wrote, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” (By the way, if you have ever sat in the middle seat of an airplane or been on a trip with young children, you know that this is simply not true.) The destination is actually very important. The New York Times published an article over the summer by Lisa Muller titled “When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?” where she observes the pitfalls of the metaphor, how the concept of a journey has become too abstract to connote any real vulnerability. “The word holds an upbeat utility these days,” she writes, “signaling struggle without darkness or detail.” It allows you to be the storyteller of your life which often leads to a controlled version that trivializes the impact of suffering.
This is all very different from the story we just heard of a man not from the land of Oz but from the land of Uz, a man named Job. He is introduced as blameless and upright. He had ten children, extreme wealth and was widely considered “the greatest of all the people of the east.” Job had it all. But, then the story cuts to the heavenly courts where God shows Job off like a proud father and Satan doesn’t buy it. He thinks Job was set up for success, born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. “Skin for skin!” Satan says. “Stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” God then turns Job over to Satan, only requesting that Satan spare his life. After heaven and hell have placed their bets, Satan wreaks total havoc. Job loses everything: his children, his wealth, his physical health. As he sits in a pile of ashes, scraping the sores that have spread over his body, Job’s wife tells him to give up the ghost. “Do you still persist in your integrity?” she says. “Curse God and die.” She has a point. By then, death would have been a relief. And yet, how does Job respond? He says, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”
What a striking thing to say. Notice that imagery. Job’s role as a person is to receive. He is not setting off to make a name for himself. He’s staying put and receiving whatever God brings his way. He is not in the driver’s seat. He’s not the narrator of his own story. For Job, life is less like a journey and more like a train wreck. I wonder if you can relate. We may buy ourselves a ticket, climb aboard, and imagine being taken to the distant places of our dreams, but we are almost always derailed. Maybe your life has gone exactly the way you planned it, but surely there was a time (and likely something you are going through right now) that can’t be reduced to a box of chocolates or a road trip.
For proper storytelling in our home, our family relies on children’s author Kate DiCamillo (we’re not alone, she has sold over forty-four million books). Her success can be credited to her innate ability to tell the truth to children without sugarcoating it. Her own life was shaped by brokenness: an abusive father and a long bout of health issues that one could describe as Job-like. The suffering of her childhood worked its way into her stories as she poignantly tells the young reader in The Tale of Despereaux, “As you well know (having lived in this world long enough to have figured out a thing or two for yourself) everything cannot always be sweetness and light.” You can see why a child would flock to her books. She understands that a child is not immune to the everyday struggles of reality.
You see, life’s bitter moments make us so uncomfortable that we often need to put a bow on them by slapping a take-away or a moral on it. Failure and suffering are made more palatable if they teach us lessons that lead to success. But what about the parts you can’t make sense of? The lingering depression, the dead-end relationships and the tragic deaths, the divorces and diagnoses?
This is why Job’s word here is a word of comfort. We can simply receive the good and the bad at the hand of God without the pressure to explain everything. As Frederick Buechner once said, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
To be clear, this is not a nihilistic lens to see through as if life was meaningless. The reason why we don’t have to be afraid is that God is no stranger to suffering and is often found at the heart of pain. In her book titled It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Divine writes that, in moments of suffering, “You need someone to hold your hand while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” If that someone is not a description of God then I don’t know what is.
In Job, God is not reduced to a sidekick or a guide on his own journey but, rather, intricately woven into the fabric of life. Job later describes God watching him every moment so that he cannot even swallow without God knowing. On the road of life, God cannot be contained to a supporting role. God is the road, the car, the map, the road signs, and the detours. God is behind the cop who pulled you over for driving 80 in a 55. He is behind the waitress filling your mug at the late-night diner and the unexpected phone call to keep you awake. If life is a journey, God is the way, the truth and the life.
And when life looks more like a trainwreck, as we wait on the side of the tracks, there remains a hope that we will be rescued. Not by our own strength or good sense of direction, but by the one who goes to meet us at the crossroads. The one who left his heavenly home for a one-star stable, the one who traveled by foot up and down the region of Galilee and all the way into the far country of sin and death, the one who journeyed up a hill called Calvary. You see, while Job’s life was spared, Jesus’s life was not. The gospel, after all, is not about our journey to wherever, but God’s journey to us - to hold our hand, to take that which cannot be fixed and carry it for us on the Cross.
So what’s the best metaphor for life? Life is a miracle of which you and I are simply witnesses. Life is a rescue mission through which you have been saved. This earthly life is but a shadow of the things to come when all will be redeemed, when our troubles will be over, when we reach our final destination, when what we thought was the end is only the beginning. Amen.
