The Importance of Leaving Home
In Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller opens with the concept of “leaving.” He explains the spiritual importance for him of making a simple move from Texas to Oregon. It opened up a whole new world for him - new places, new perspectives, new people. It made him appreciate going back home so much more. It taught him to not just rely on the familiar - to adapt, grow, and change.
At some point in our lives, we all need to leave home.
Recently, I heard a speaker named Andrew Shearman talk on the importance of leaving home. He challenged the group with the question, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” He recounted the story of when he sat down for coffee with the father of a missionary who was in Africa, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and so forth. The father was frustrated with the son who had left home on this radical adventure instead of paying off his loans and getting a “real job.”
A few minutes later, the father’s other son came in, equally upset, ranting, “I am so pissed off!” Andrew asked why. “Because he’s out there… doing it! He’s really doing it! And I’m stuck in this office, talking to parents all day long.” The missionary’s brother was a youth pastor. Why was he so upset? “Because he never left home,” Andrew told us.
This recalled a fifteen-day trip I took to Mexico in January of this year. I was visiting a group of young people who, disenchanted with American church, left for a year-long journey around the world.
Imagine this - 50 North Americans willingly selling their possessions and leaving the comfort of their homes in search of abundant life. That’s this group - the World Race - and they’re still out there, really doing it. Visiting this group was challenging, but invigorating. We all need to journey. We all need to discover.
Seth Barnes, founder of the program, describes it as “a commitment to a transformational discovery process. The World Race taps an ancient human compulsion to take a spiritual pilgrimage.” The rite of pilgrimage - an initiation into adult life - is a forgotten practice in the West. We’ve lost the art of leaving.
Is it any wonder that twenty-somethings are having what John Mayer calls a “quarter-life crisis,” that they’re struggling to know what life is supposed to really be about? We’ve sold our souls to careers tracks and our family name to the burden of college debt. One day, we’re laughing with some friends at an all-night café, cramming for a final exam so we can graduate, and the next, we’re thrust into the real world where everyone is expecting something different from us. If we’re not careful, it’s easy to lose our desires amidst all those expectations.
“Most young people,” Barnes explains, “have more questions than answers…and what better place to find them than on a pilgrimage?”
The irony of the pilgrimage of the World Race is that as they go and discover more about themselves, it becomes less about them and more about seeking justice and redemption in the world. They’ve rescued women from the sex industry in Thailand, saved orphans from abandonment in Swaziland, and planted churches in the Andes Mountains.
Through the hospitality of strangers, they’re learning interdependence, that we all need each other and not one of us has it all figured out just yet.
I started making my own mini-pilgrimages about a year ago to downtown Nashville to eat lunch with the homeless. I had to do something to wake up from my suburbanite slumber. I was desperate to touch the broken and to be touched by them, to experience God in a tangible way. As I hear their tales of hard times and tough luck, of addiction and redemption, I learn so much about my own need, comfort, and brokenness. I learn that life - real life - has little to do with possessions and mostly to do with people.
I can’t fully express how important it is to leave home. This is not a concept to be debated - it is something tangible to be experienced. Only then is the importance of pilgrimage fully grasped. Once you’ve seen the sun set in a different part of the world or eaten dinner at an unusual time or faced someone whose very lifestyle contradicted your own, then your worldview begins to expand.
This is necessary, if we’re to be the kind of people we’re destined to be. We’re naturally inclined to think that life is mostly about us - our comfort, our stuff, our welfare. Our excess. We can’t expect our flesh just to “get it”; we’re not that intelligent or that good. We need something to wake us up, jostle us out of bed, and set us on a path towards home.
That’s the great irony of this - a pilgrimage, the act of leaving home, actually leads one home, though it is never where one started.
A pilgrim must be a child who can approach everything with an attitude of wonder, awe and faith. Pray for wonder, awe, desire. Ask God to take away your sophistication and cynicism. Ask God to take away the restless, anxious heart of the tourist, which always needs to find the new, the more, the curious…
We go on pilgrimage so we can go back home and know that we never need to go on pilgrimage again. Pilgrimage has achieved its purpose when we can see God in our everyday and ordinary lives. (Richard Rohr)
To find out more about pilgrimage, visit www.theworldrace.org, read Don Miller’s book mentioned in the first paragraph, or check out a modern-day fable called The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo.
Posted on October 15, 2007 12:00 AM
Comments
Great post. Very insightful.
Posted by: Chris A | October 15, 2007 4:21 AM
it's funny how true it is. I once left Houston to go to school in Dallas for a year. And with that year being alone away from the familiar, i finally learned how to grow up. it really put the colors into life.
Posted by: Devin Dildine | October 15, 2007 9:01 PM
This speaks so much truth. I left where I grew up in suburban Ohio to be a teacher in Florida. Not exactly the other side of the world, but a culture shock nonetheless. I've often wondered what I am doing here, and why God chose this of all places. This is the reason I consistently get, that I could not have matured in the ways I have these past two years had I stayed in the familiar.
Posted by: Isaac Ligocki | October 16, 2007 7:58 AM
Hello!
I'm also a big Paulo Coelho fan and I don't know if you�ve heard about his blog
http://www.paulocoelhoblog.com
I started as a fan and now I'm collaborating with him and thought that you would like to enter his universe.
Check out the blog, if you want, or subscribe to his newsletter
http://www.warriorofthelight.com/engl/index.html
You'll see a community of warriors of light sharing ideas, dreams and most importantly following their personal legend.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"God, in his infinite wisdom,
hid Hell in the middle of Paradise, to keep us on our toes."
See you there and have a great day!
Aart
Posted by: Jorge | October 16, 2007 9:21 PM
You make an important point although "we all need to leave home" may not be the essence of it. If by "we" you mean those of us who are caught in our "suburbanite slumber" and the "excess" of western living, I agree that getting out of our subculture opens our hearts and minds to God and others. But there are plenty of others bound by poverty, illness, circumstances, or the call of God to stay home or to build a home instead of go on pilgrimage. For some it's not a pilgrimage but caring for an invalid parent, raising children, making a home among the poor of their city, to name a few examples. I would hate for someone to feel invalidated in the hard road God has called them to that is not a proper pilgrimage per se.
Leaving home is a good idea but not the only one God uses to refine us, and certainly not a universal call. Allowing God to strip us of our comfort, wealth, and the things we use to define ourselves, being radical in loving God and fellow man - that is the overarching message. For me, that means allowing God to use the constant challenge of raising my two young kids even though in my flesh I'd much rather leave home for an adventure.
Posted by: Karen | October 17, 2007 6:52 AM
Karen, great point. I would say that "allowing God to strip us of our comfort, wealth, and the things we use to define ourselves, being radical in loving God and fellow man" is essentially a form of "leaving home." Just replace home with comfort, and you've got the point of the message. of course we can leave home and still hang onto our small-minded ethnocentricity, and that's no good. the point of leaving is to grow and learn selflessness, that the world doesn't revolve around my watch. thanks again for your very insightful response.
Posted by: Jeff Goins | October 17, 2007 11:40 PM
Yes, I was just reflecting this morning that physical leaving is just one expression of a deeper leaving that pertains to the heart, the will, and the spirit.
That is probably similar to when God calls a man to "leave" his father and mother and "cleave" to his wife. It can't mean that he literally has to leave his parents' home, although that certainly helps, because centuries of history and the variety of human experience shows that it is good and necessary sometimes for generations to cohabitate. Therefore this type of "leaving" also points to a turning of the will and the emotions away from a certain point and towards the direction of God's call, which is what you were driving at too.
Posted by: Karen | October 18, 2007 7:29 AM
Exactly, Karen. You get it. You should write the next essay: what's essential is that we leave and that if necessary, that be physically. Great clarification here.
Posted by: Jeff | October 18, 2007 10:53 AM
This is so true. There is a comfort in being around familiar things. I'm in the midst f my pilgrimage right now. I took a job touring the country with a christian band and it has been really hard. I can't feel like a tourist, I can't feel like the trip is for me because I'm in the crew, working in every city I wake up in. But I know when I come home, I'll have left a layer of immaturity somewhere is the mid west, and I can see the change even though I can't feel it. This part of a life in pivotal, and everyone should try and experience it as young or as soon as possible.
Posted by: Michael Pierce | October 19, 2007 10:25 AM
Good stuff, Michael. Amen. Pivotal. Great call to action.
Posted by: Jeff Goins | October 21, 2007 6:37 PM
I'm turning 18 next year. and im going to go on my journey.
Posted by: A Reader | October 27, 2007 11:02 PM
2years ago I picked up a family of 6- 4boys Husband and Wife, put everything we owned in to suitcases and stepped out. God provided EVERYTHING else.
I suppose not everyone is equipped to do this, and many might actually be hurt trying but if I would have stayed in one place we would not be where we are today, with God, each other and the tiny town we live in.
Posted by: Matt L | November 1, 2007 12:10 PM
I'm 46 years old. I left home when I was 19 to go to college. After graduating I returned home with the plan of finding a job. At the time it made sense to move back with mom and dad so that I could be relieved of the pressure of finding a place to live while I searched for a job.
It wasn't long before I discovered that I didn't "fit" in my parents home any longer. I had been gone 4 years. In that time I must have changed. What I failed to realize was that I had already left home when I went to college. I learned that for me once I left home I could never go back.
If anyone is interested my most recent post at www.letterstoashlee.blogspot.com has much to do with the topic of leaving home. Thanks.
Caleb
Posted by: Caleb | November 4, 2007 5:04 AM
Great, Caleb. I felt that same "discomfort" of not fitting.
Posted by: Jeff Goins | November 7, 2007 9:17 AM
I'm standing on the edge of this journey, and it scares me to death yet gives me a feeling of life I've never known at the same time.
I'll be moving out of my parents home for the first time in my 20 years of life and moving in with people I hardly know, going back to a school which I've been away from for the last year ... it's going to be a dramatic change. And I need some change.
As Remy, the little rat in Disney/Pixar's movie Ratatouille said, "Change is nature."
Posted by: Forester | November 23, 2007 10:42 PM
good quote.
Posted by: Jeff Goins | December 9, 2007 9:43 PM