Misdirected Wanderlust

My facebook status yesterday read: “I wish I wasn’t so practical – it has a way of trumping my wanderlust!” Wanderlust creeps up on me often. It crept up on me yesterday as I was searching airline websites to see what kind of location I could reach with my stockpile of frequent flier miles. It hit me like a wave today as every bone in my body craved to be spending my summer out on the Cape. This all causes me to question – is such a desire to travel, to wander, to be anywhere but here sinful? Is this ache for distant places inherently bad? Maybe my theology is faulty here, but I don’t think the presence of such a craving in my soul is wrong – it is what (or where) I crave that is sinful. I should feel unsatisfied or a little out of place in Ames, Iowa. Why? Because the only place that can satisfy me is heaven, for that is truly my home. I can travel to the pristine beaches of Cape Cod, the ruins of ancient Greece, or the isle of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania and still be left yearning for more. God has set eternity in the hearts of men (Ecclesiastes 3:11). My wandering soul will find fulfillment the day I set foot in in the glorious place Christ has gone to prepare for me (John 14:1-3). God reminded me of this today by leading me to Psalm 84:

¹⁰ Better is one day in your courts
    than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
    than dwell in the tents of the wicked.
¹¹ For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
    the Lord bestows favor and honor;
no good thing does he withhold
    from those whose walk is blameless.

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Besides this desire for travel I have identified in myself, we humans have a craving for something we can’t seem to put our finger upon. This excerpt from Weight of Glory shows why I love anything C.S. Lewis ever penned. 

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”