My interest in the game might be fascinating to outside observers because of how doggedly bad I am at playing it. Try as I may, rarely do I keep the ball in the fairway, hit the greens in regulation, or sink my putts for par or better. While I have learned to tame my slice, that is about all I can show for the thousands of strokes I have put in over the past five years or so. Though my game is not a total loss, I feel that my scores do not reflect the hours of time I have devoted to it or the number of miles I have covered walking the course. I like to say that God sparked my interest in golf to humble me, and I have little evidence to dissuade me from this belief.
As odd as it may sound, I see great commonality in my stubbornly bad golf game and our attempts to live the good life. Like knowing where you want the ball to go but being perpetually unable to send it there, so our attempts to embody goodness, wholeness, and righteousness by our own efforts are doomed to fail. We are almost fated to screw things up, hurt one another, deceive our friends, family, and neighbors, and even lie to ourselves in ways that are destructive. Like forever missing the green or hitting our ball into water hazards, we can see and know what it is to be good, but we can never get there on our own. I don’t think I am overstating things when I say that we all have moments when it feels like our lives come up short and our best efforts are for not.
This is why we wander. We wander with Jesus in the wilderness enduring the hardship of human frailty. We wander with the Israelites trying painfully to figure out freedom for the first time in centuries. We wander because even though we know that we want to get to the promised land, we find ourselves stubbornly unable to be the promised people that God wants us to be. Like a frustrated golfer throwing his club into the pond he just hit his ball into, so we are perpetually thwarted in our attempts at perfection and are repeatedly left wandering haplessly towards a promised future we can never reach on our own.
Thankfully, graciously, lovingly, our wandering ends at the cross of Christ. All our messes, hurts, harms, and forlorn journeys lead us to the One who makes things right. While we constantly trip ourselves up in our efforts to follow in the way of the Lord, our Messiah will never fail to make the world whole. This is what Easter is all about and I am grateful to wander back there with you all this month.
In Christ,
Pastor Seth