Luke 24:13-35
The worst trip I’ve ever taken also turned out to be one of the best. When I was nineteen years old and still suffering from residual adolescent irritability, my dad planned a two-hundred-mile canoe trip for us on the Missinaibi River in Ontario. We would drive twelve hours into Canada, then paddle for eight to ten days to Hudson Bay on the Arctic Ocean. Our two companions were a tough-as-nails ultra marathoner and a part-time dogsled musher who had never canoed before. I knew it would be an adventure, but I didn’t know how frustrating some of that adventure would be. Here are a few lowlights:
- The mosquitoes and blackflies were so thick that we had to wear head nets any time we were on shore.
- We paddled for fourteen hours every day, sometimes in water so shallow that we were forced to walk our canoes for extended periods.
- Our companions got turned sideways in large rapids and wrapped their aluminum canoe around a rock, so we had to spend an afternoon pounding out the dents with stones and sealing the tears with duct tape and epoxy.
- My father snored all night, every night, in our two-person tent (and he took up a person and a half of that two-person tent).
- One of our portages was ten miles long, much of it with ankle-deep mud, and took us sixteen hours to complete. My dad was so exhausted in the evening that he collapsed in the tent and was shaking uncontrollably for nearly an hour.
Terrible, awful trip.
But we take every journey twice. There is the journey itself with its sights and sounds, its ups and downs; and then there is the journey taken in retrospect, when time passes and we reflect upon the meaning of what we have experienced. The other experiences of our lives continually redefine these journeys.
On the Road to Emmaus, Cleopas and his colleague are on a journey unimaginably worse than a challenging canoe trip. They are walking away from Jerusalem, possibly fleeing, after the person on whom they pinned their greatest personal and national hopes, Jesus of Nazareth, has been humiliated, executed, and apparently exposed as a false messiah. When Jesus joins their dejected group (unrecognized by them), he could have revealed the truth of his resurrection from the beginning of their walk and helped them to believe in a different narrative. Instead, he teaches them more slowly. He places the journey they understand—their initial hopes and the crushing of their dreams—into the broad history of God’s walk with humanity through history, and they wonder at the power of that new perspective. Their physical journey of confusion and despair through the walk to Emmaus is then woven into a much greater story of grace, forgiveness, and redemption. Imagine how their experience of the walk to Emmaus was transformed in the days, weeks, and years ahead--as they reflected on its meaning through the trials and joys of their lives. The first journey was important. The redefined second journey meant everything.
In the years after canoeing with my dad, the hardships of the trip faded away and the lessons grew. We bonded over that misery many times and laughed about the absurdity of some of our experiences. Beyond that, the journey helped us to consider the costs and benefits of taking risks and encouraged us to reframe other hard things we experienced in life. Most of all, it made me appreciate my dad’s spirit of adventure and the ways in which he wanted to share that with me. What was torturous at the time has become a treasured gift.
It’s easy to think of our lives as a series of journeys in which we succeed or fail, and even to think that the events of our lives determine whether we are “blessed” or not. But when we place our stories in the larger narrative of the gospel—a story in which we have already won—we gain a new perspective on the journeys of our lives.
Questions for Reflection:
- What especially hard journey have you been on? How did time change your perspective of it? If you are now in the midst of a hard journey, how might you imagine yourself seeing it differently in the future?
Prayer:
Lord, as we travel through this life, give us perseverance and perspective. Teach us to recognize how our stories are made meaningful through their contribution to the story that you have already given us. Amen.
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