BEING ON THE WAY IS THE WAY

Every parent has heard more than once the plaint from the back seat, “Are we there yet?” Children by their very nature are impatient. They have no concept of time or distance. When my sister was teaching school, on her birthday she always used to ask her first-graders how old they thought she was. Their answers ranged from 10 years to 100. They had no idea. She always appreciated the “25” response and choked on any response well past her real age at the time.

To children ten minutes is no different than ten hours, three miles no different than three hundred. What they care about is the moment. They want what they want right now, not ten minutes from now. They want grandma’s house to be right around the next bend and now twenty miles down the road. That is their way. They do not want to be on the way; they want to be there…and now.

As adults we are really no different. We want to get where we are going, wherever it is we are going, and we want to be there now. We may enjoy being on the way, but we would rather already be there: at the office, at the beach, at church, wherever. We would prefer not to have to wait fifteen minutes for our prescription to be filled, two months for the surgery just to be scheduled, six years to retirement. Right now would be best.

Our impatience with time and distance notwithstanding, the fact is that being on the way is the way, the way of life. While there will always be a destination towards which we are headed – grandma’s, retirement, even heaven – what is important is what is happening on the way. What is important is what we are doing on the way to wherever it is we are heading. What is also important is what God is doing along our way, both with us and for us on this journey.

What is also important to remember is that the road we are on is not the road to perfection: the perfect visit, the perfect day at work, the perfect life. Nothing we ever do will ever be done perfectly. We can always do something better even if it is only infinitesimally better. We will never be the perfect child, the perfect spouse, the perfect Christian. We will always fall short.

None of this means that we need not try to be better or to do better simply because we will never be perfect. It does mean that we don’t beat ourselves up over the fact that we were less than perfect, that somehow God is going to judge us harshly because we came up short, or because we come up short again and again and again. God knows our imperfections. That is why God is always with us on our journey.

That is also why we must be more attentive to what we are doing on the way rather than what is at the end of the path. We are always on the way even in death. For in death we are on the way to new life. My suspicion is that even in death, even in the resurrected life to come, we will still be on the way. We will still be growing, learning something new, experiencing something we never experienced before. Always being on the way, no matter how long it takes, is the way of life. We need to enjoy the trip.