Sojourn: Learning Life from Wild Places

Increasing numbers of people in our culture, particularly middle-aged men, are finding that the things they worked for over the past two decades are simply not providing the fulfillment they originally expected from them. We are coming to realize that our homes, vehicles, jobs and possessions are not sufficient to stave off the crisis of meaning many of us find when life does not meet our expectations. Sojourn reminds us that life is often messy-complex and full of fear-just as it should be. Learning from the few wild places still available to us in our culture can provide us with the realization that a weighty life is a life on its way to an important integration of body, soul, heart, and spirit.

After graduating from Denver Seminary with an M.Div Degree in Historical Theology in 1994, I moved with my family to plant churches in rural Southern Colorado. While we planted churches in a rural Western context and helped other planters begin additional new works nearby, we spent a great deal of our free time learning to enjoy the natural beauty of our surroundings. In 2003, as a result of successful endeavors in a difficult context, I was offered a position as the Director of Church Planting over a region of five western states. During the nearly three years as I worked out of a District Office in Omaha, Nebraska I found myself increasingly frustrated at the apparent disconnect between new church start-ups in an American context and a culture (particularly in the Western United States) which seemed to be detaching itself from the Christian faith. It was apparent that the church had bought into the consumer mentality which believed that the answers to any crisis were to be found in a greater influx of cash and resources. While larger churches continued to grow at the expense of smaller, local community churches, the overall picture of the Christian Church in America was in decline both numerically and in its apparent impact on behavior. This realization precipitated a more personal crisis for me. My family and I moved to Western Colorado where I began working as a roughneck on a drilling rig in 2006. Nearing my middle years, I became personally broken and frustrated with my own sense of wothlessness as my education and experiences seemed to have all been for naught. It was following a particularly dark year of my life and in the presence of a wise Christian counselor that I was finally able to piece together some sense of perspective on why I-and people like me-were apparently unable to find any anchorage in life. Along with my wife and three teenage children, I continue to live on the Western Slope of