Life Meant To Be Embraced With Passion

For almost a year now, I’ve been a bona fide, though unofficial, “leaf-peeper.”

That’s because last fall my wife and I made our first pilgrimage to New England. And of course we returned oohing and aahing at the beautiful autumn colors in New Hampshire and Maine.

I even have some pictures to prove it. (Would you like to see them? I carry them with me always. They’re here some place.)

But leaf-peeping isn’t really my life! Some folks almost suggest that life isn’t worth living if you haven’t done a leaf-peeping pilgrimage to New England in the fall.

I did thoroughly enjoy New England, but more for the geographic beauty, American heritage and our family friends there than for the leaves.

Of course, life-making pilgrimages don’t always end up in New England. Israel is filled with tourists from the world over straining to gaze at the holy sites.

Having also been there, I’m tempted to call us Israel visitors site-peepers or rock-peepers. I think Israel grows rocks and holy sites, sometimes in the same places.

I’m fascinated and drawn deeply to Israel. But the holy sites are secondary to me. The contemporary people and their political and spiritual ties to their rich past are what enrich my pilgrimages.

Yet we don’t even have to travel out of state or country to live peripherally. We can do our life-peeping through less expensive pilgrimages.

Window-shopping and garage-saling and church-hopping come to mind. There is quite a variety of ways we can wander through life as spectators and never taste and touch what it is we see.

I’m particularly aware of church-hoppers, since I’ve met so many in my 28 years as a pastor. They are as well-intentioned as leaf-peepers, Holy Land pilgrims, window-shoppers and garage-salers. They are also as self-protective.

Being a tourist, regardless of where and what we visit, is sometimes a substitute for courageously ordinary living.

“It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” A cute cliche, and one filled with a deeper truth than we usually admit.

Have you been a tourist anywhere yet this summer? Enjoy it.

But you might think about how one touring couple entered into life rather than just peeping at it.

I met these folks sometime after they took a 12,000-mile motorcycle trip around our country. They went church-hopping seven times on their eight-week trip.

Some Sunday mornings it was zip into worship, zip out after worship. But occasionally they were literally and spiritually touched by some of the people.

Offered table hospitality, they were nourished not only by the food but by the graciousness of their Sunday afternoon hosts. In those moments, they were more than tourists. They found friendship.

To me, friendship is a very tangible part of the spirituality God yearns for each of us to experience.

And among other things, they discovered this: Church-hopping can have its redemptive moments. That’s helpful to know when we also know churchhopping is too often an excuse to protect ourselves from a significant spiritual connection with people, and even God.

Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of some obvious things. Like, God is eager for people to be more than life-peepers.

Life is designed to be lived with hope and passion, not gazed at with longing and wishful thinking.

In those times when we peep at leaves or do whatever we do to keep life at a distance, I wonder if God isn’t looking at us and whispering to us, “Come on in. The life is fine!”

xxxx