In Search of Self and Vocation

August 24th, 2005 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

A few quick things:

Anyway, on to the actual post…

My friend Tom and I have been talking a lot during the last two days. At one point, half jokingly, I said that we should spend J-term[2] traveling. Slightly inspired by Donald Miller’s new book, Through Painted Deserts (which is a reworked version of his first book, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance[3]), in which Donald and a friend pick up and leave their home state of Texas with no plans except to go to the Grand Canyon and eventually end up in Oregon, I thought it might be cool if Tom and I just dropped everything for a month and travel around the country.

The more we talked about it, the more serious we got.

We would spend as much time in January as we could - 4 full weeks - on a journey through the eastern U.S. We talked about trying to get tuition credit at Luther for this proposed “course” and making it actually mean something. Titles for the course were tossed around, such as Traveling the American Frontier: In Search of Self and Vocation and An Odyssey through America: Sojourners in Search of Self and Vocation - something that sounds very academic[4]. You see, we actually want to learn from this experience. The hardest part, though, will be getting it approved for credit and finding an academic advisor. Part of the journey will involve Tom and I writing all of our experiences with the intention of compiling them into a book or thesis-length paper at the end.

We don’t want a strict itinerary. We do, however, need to have some idea of what we want to do and where we want to go. One of the early decisions was which direction to go, so we picked East. Other ideas that were tossed around were: living for 3-5 days in an Amish community - eating, sleeping, and working with them, going to an Indian reservation, living in an inner city, hiking in the Appalacians, and visiting the last remaining Shakers, among other things.

As Donald Miller says in Through Painted Deserts,

It’s interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town in which you were born. It’s funny how you can’t ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal.

More on the journey as it unfolds…

[1] My photoblog is a place to dump all of my pictures and is hosted on Luther’s servers, while my Flickr account has select pictures and is more permanent in nature.
[2] J-term is a mini-semester during the month of January, inbetween fall and spring semesters.
[3] PAVM is no longer in print, and now sells for no less than $30 on places such as Half.com.
[4] See Luther’s Sense of Vocation program.