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 no 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” (to quote Alanis Morissette).

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 Through Painted Deserts or check out a modern-day fable called the Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo.

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