How Does a Hobbit Get to Mt. Doom?

After traveling across America for years in an old camper with his dog Charley, the great American novelist, John Steinbeck, sums up his travel philosophy with this statement: “We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

An intriguing philosophy, yet Steinbeck tells his story in Travels with Charley in the active tense: He — the Subject — takes this journey. Grammatically, he is in full control throughout. Yet in reflecting back upon his journey, he perhaps begins to realize that though his grammar was correct, his telling of the story may not have been. In retrospect, “after years of struggle,” he realizes that the story should have been told in the passive tense: the Trip (subject) took him (object) on a journey.

This has certainly been true of my spiritual “trip” — a trip which began 50 years ago on the southern tip of Africa, wound its way through Los Angeles, Tokyo, Turkey, and Texas, and deposited me in the middle of Kansas 14 years ago. And like Steinbeck, I too only began to realize in retrospect, that “after years of struggle,” I had too, had been the object, not the subject, of my journey.

I was always under the impression that I was the navigator of my spiritual journey, like a Columbus in search of a new world. But in retrospect, I began to see myself far more like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, who found himself being taken on a journey by some strange invisible hand. Frodo begins to realize at a deeper and deeper level that he had not chosen his journey to Mt. Doom nearly as much as the journey had chosen him. He had been called to the impossible task of destroying the Ring of Power not because he was the strongest, but because he was the weakest; and because he didn’t want power. Gandalf chose him because of this.

Unlike Frodo, though, who thought adventures were nasty, inconvenient things which made you late for dinner, I had always yearned for adventure.

I remember as a little boy in Cape Town, eagerly watching all the great ships coming and going around the southern tip of Africa. One day I saw an arctic freighter chugging out of Cape Town harbor, bound for the continent of Antarctica some 4000 miles directly south of us. And I remember just bursting into tears, so intense was my desire to be on board that ship, and to escape the monotony of my 3rd-grade existence in an all-white Afrikaans/English grade school.

These wanderlust yearnings were triggered in me again a few years later, when my 5th-grade teacher showed us a slide show of the great Ferdinand Magellan, leaving Portugal in the early 1500s, sailing west across the Atlantic on the first ship to circumnavigate the planet. Deeply inspired to go where no fifth grader had gone before, I went up to my teacher after class and asked:

I was shocked and disappointed, but not crushed. Because a few months later, I watched, astounded, on a huge public TV screen, as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. It was 1969, and I had just discovered my calling. For the next 5 years of my life, I was committed to becoming an astronaut — until, that is, I failed high school Trigonometry.

But in 1977 I immigrated to America with my family — and discovered a continent-sized country just waiting to be vagabonded across. In the next few years, I circumnavigated this giant country by bus, bicycle, motorbike, and thumb. I slept 14 nights in a row on one 9000-mile Greyhound trip, leaving LA for the great lakes, the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and back — hitting 20 of the largest cities I could find en route. I hitchhiked across the Midwest in the middle of winter and rode my bicycle from Canada to Mexico — which took 3 bicycles and 5 months to complete.

Yet after all these trips, the most important trip of all — my journey to God — remained to be completed. And so, after graduating from college in 1983, I finally discovered a spiritual way of fulfilling my star-trek vision of going where no man had been before. I would become a pioneer missionary and go, where no missionary had gone before. I would plant a church, where no church had ever been planted before. I would go to the Kurds of Northern Iraq, the Pashtuns of central Pakistan, or the Turkish refugees of Bulgaria.

And so I began to look for a wife — a fellow road junkie — a beautiful and sensitive woman who would go with me to the most isolated city in Turkey to plant a church.

It took me 30 years before I finally found her, and we ended up leaving for Turkey just one year after our wedding—ready to go, where no missionary had gone before; ready to plant churches in the most unreached and inaccessible urban areas of what has been called the largest unreached nation on earth.

But after a decade of missionary training, support-raising, and preparation, we only lasted one year in Turkey. Because even though I had found the greatest traveling buddy possible in Laurel, my wife, I had also, unfortunately, discovered my sinful self. And the mission agency which had vigorously recruited me ended up firing me for insubordination.

And so we returned to LA with our tails between our legs — and hundreds of Turkish grammar constructions spinning like hamster wheels inside our heads. But my heaviest burden was not my broken dream — it was my wife’s. She was innocent and had fallen in love with Turkey. But she had vowed to stay with me for better or for worse. And so returned to LA to share my brokenness with me. Our dreams of becoming great pioneer missionaries had collided head-on with my narcissistic self.

Back in LA, age 32, missionary reject. My lifelong yearning for pilgrimage — of any sort — had been completely knocked out of me, and I hit the streets trying to find a 9–5 job. I ended up becoming a high-school English teacher in downtown LA for the next 8 years. (If you can’t do; teach!). But life was good. It was comfortable. (I had great dental). But the yearning for pilgrimage had never completely left me. And every year we kept asking each other, my wife and I: “So, when do you think we will go back to Turkey?”

But God never opened that door; instead, he seemed to place within me a growing desire for a completely different type of road trip — a road trip back across time, rather than across an ocean; an internal rather than an external odyssey.

While teaching in LA, a curiosity had been building up within me to travel back into the roots of my faith, and white-African culture, to figure out why my own white tribe had visited such misery on the southern tip of Africa 400 years ago; why the Christian church had supported the transatlantic slave-trade (yet also issued the first-ever official statement against slavery*), and why we struggle so desperately with our depravity as a human species.

When I shared this dream with my wife, she burst into tears. She knew that her comfortable Southern California life was about to change — once again. And after 8 years in suburban LA, I gave up my tenured job as a teacher, sold our house, packed all we owned into a U-haul, and moved out with two small sons to the University of Texas at Dallas to start a Ph.D. in the Humanities.

I have learned more about sin, depravity, and the problem of evil than ever before on this academic leg of my spiritual journey. I re-discovered that my greatest need is for forgiveness and that the ancient faith of Christianity is the only creed that fully recognizes the deep depravity at the core of the human race. And I learned, as Don Miller in Blue Like Jazz did, that until I realize I am the problem of the Universe, my journey is in vain.

Like Frodo Baggins, I also began to realize that my journey is only a tiny part of a much, much bigger story. I find myself caught up in a Salvation drama far larger, stranger, complex, and more beautiful than I ever imagined it to be. My journey is not something I can control through some 5-step formula. It tosses me around; it moves me — like a pawn — on a battlefield much bigger than my own life.

“You did not choose me,” Jesus reminded his confused disciples on the night before he was to be arrested and tortured to death, “but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit — -fruit that will last” (John 15.16). They were also part of a far stranger and greater Drama than they ever realized, just two years after Jesus had first called them to drop their fishing nets and follow him on a strange and incredible journey.

When Gandalf returned to the Shire with the terrible news that Sauron was again on the loose, and told Frodo that he needed him to help destroy the ring of power, Frodo shivered with fear and exclaimed: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” “So do I,” said Gandalf, “But that is not for [us] to decide…All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us.”

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