This morning I head out on the beginning of numerous pilgrimages in 2011. I will be joining 40 students from Texas A & M in New Orleans, the location of the very first trip I led eighteen years ago. When I departed by bus for New Orleans that fall of 1993, I thought I was leading a mission trip. Instead, I discovered pilgrimage.
A good friend who was a missionary in New Orleans, Darren Bruce, invited me down for a risky experiment. For a week, thirty teenagers would serve in one of the poorest, crime-infested communities in America. On the edge of the historic Mississippi River town of Algiers loomed the Fischer Projects. A daily murder was not an unusual occurrence in this oppressed pocket on the Westbank. Our multiethnic group of Dallas teens dove into the community with a mixture of zeal and fear. Groups like ours did not visit the Fischer- EVER. We had to earn the locals’ trust but we were not quite sure where to begin.
For five days we cleaned up the trash profusely scattered throughout the 13-acres of apartments. I do not know how it began, but while we served we started to sing. The group loved to sing anything, everything and at all times. So as they scooped up discarded boxes and discarded household items into black trash bags they sang joyfully. As leather-gloved hands collected used needles and condoms, they sang loudly. While apartment breezeways were swept and piles of rotting food removed from the local park, they belted out tunes until their voices hurt. You know what we discovered? New Orleanians love music! Oh, they appreciated the trash being cleared. But they connected with the music. First they listened with apprehension but curiosity soon followed. In a couple of days, they began to sing with us. Finally they walked beside us, cleaning up trash and singing new songs. (In fact, after we left, the community formed teams that kept the Fischer clean for years!)
In the evenings the team discovered New Orleans. After all my travels, I still call the Big Easy the most foreign location in the USA. Her history captivated us. Cajun food tickled our taste buds like the colors of a Marti Gras parade. Hearing jazz while floating down the Mississippi on an authentic steamboat became a transcendent experience for some. Most of the kids had never been to a place this old, this odd, and this mysterious. I fell in love with the Crescent City. We came as learners, poised to serve the locals with the intention of getting close. The intimacy of friendship formed lifelong bonds. Our only agenda was to travel into a foreign land, to be led by God and to learn what it meant to lay our lives down for others.
That week I learned voyages like our trip to New Orleans are sacred and rare. Our trip was a perfect metaphor for our lifelong spiritual journeys. Most people looked at a week like that as a once in a lifetime experience. But we came back with more than memories. Those who dove deep returned with new lives, new eyes and new experiences that changed the framework of their worldviews. This was no mere event. Our journey would forever alter the lives of those who dared allow themselves to engage.
This trip undid my world and nothing was ever the same since then. Throughout scripture and history he was guiding his servants into the desert, out to unknown lands, and into the midst of unusual people. Not only does He seem to delight in these adventures but He has also wired us to be pilgrims, seekers of mystery and truth. And if we are not, in some way engaged in pilgrimage, our soul solidifies like drying cement and we start to become unbreakable, immovable, intolerable and deaf to the voice of God.
Whether you ever leave for foreign lands or not, you have a choice to walk daily as God’s pilgrim. What will you do with tomorrow’s steps?
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