Tourists and Pilgrims
Where do you go when you can’t stay where you are?
For my family, the answer was Mitchell.
It’s been eight years, one month, one week, and one day since we Van Meters arrived in our adopted hometown after an understandably arduous journey from our former home in northeast Arkansas. By the time we reached Sioux Falls, we had driven 741 miles through heat and darkness and—I swear to this—more miles with road construction than without. Denise and I got separated in a severe thunderstorm that knocked out cell towers and led to perhaps the most spectacular fight of our two decades of marriage.
But as we made the turn on to I-90, all of that was behind us. Ahead was….
Nothing. No towns, no people, no trees. Literally nothing.
Not that my home state is exactly the seat of urban culture. It’s mostly farmland—rice and beans and cotton and chickens. It markets itself as The Natural State because of its outdoor recreation. But there are more humans and more collections of humans than here in South Dakota, not to mention more barns and trees to interrupt the view along the road. Even the most remote place in Arkansas (Felsenthal Wildlife Refuge) is only about 12 miles from the nearest town.
Not so on the prairie, where space is filled with more space. It took 80 miles out of Sioux Falls to get to the next town of consequence—Mitchell, our new home. When I caught sight of the water tower on the horizon, a single question took over my entire being.
Oh God. What have I done?
I should have seen it coming—all this space. In the early years of our marriage, Denise and I had lived for awhile in Rapid City. We had driven I-90 across the state several times, and it was no more populated then than it is now. Plus, Denise and I had driven from the Sioux Falls airport to Mitchell for my interview two months earlier. So this sense of desolation and desperation I felt should not have been a surprise to me. I knew—or thought I knew—what I was getting myself into.
I didn't.
Always before, I’d driven that stretch as a tourist—just passing through on the way to somewhere else. To my recollection, I’d never even stopped in Mitchell for gas before. If I had, I would not have found anything remarkable about the experience. Tourists are too wrapped up in their own journeys to consider what it might be like to actually be a resident of the places they visit.
On that day in 2014, however, we weren't tourists anymore. We were coming in as residents. More than that that, we were pilgrims.
Pilgrims, as Eugene Peterson defines the term, are people who spend their lives going someplace, going to God. They aren’t just passing through as consumers, taking what is useful or feels good and leaving the rest for someone else to deal with. Pilgrims invest in the road they travel—the way of Jesus—and in the places they make their homes. A tourist always knows he can withdraw back to his own comfortable place if the going gets tough. A pilgrim has no path but the one path, no place to run away to. A pilgrim has decided that, even if he returns to his homeland one day, there is no going back to the way things were.
I didn’t adopt this attitude all at once. Our journey from Paragould, AR, to Mitchell, SD, began not because this is such an attractive place to be. We moved because our lives had fallen apart where we were. The story is too long for a single blog post, and honestly it’s still exhausting to tell it. Suffice to say that our last several months in Arkansas included institutional dysfunction, family struggles, church meltdowns, and an overall belief that we the life we were living did not have a positive future.
We didn’t really know where we were going. We just knew we couldn’t stay where we were.
You’ve probably been there too. When a big thing happens—retirement, divorce, the loss of a job or loved one—you are emotionally displaced. The world where you live kicks you out, forces you into a different space.
But pilgrims aren’t just those displaced by life events. Some of us—more of us than anyone realizes—have a deep sense that something is wrong with the world. We don’t want to remain stuck in the same meaningless rut that we find ourselves in. We want to live a better way. We just don’t know how to get started.
Or maybe we do know. We just have a hard time finding the courage.
The first step in becoming a pilgrim is to reject being a tourist in the places we live and work and worship. We have to say “no” to the idea that the world exists for our happiness and fulfillment, that what matters most of all is how we feel about a person or thing. We are not put on this planet to snap pictures and gather likes and tick things off our to-do lists. Rather, we are created to love God and love our neighbors, and that commitment can make our lives look very, very weird.
That comes later, though. Pilgrims don’t start the journey knowing how it will all turn out. Rather, they begin by saying, “Not here. Not this.” And they step onto the path in something like faith, believing that even the roads that seem the most empty can go someplace in the end.
Our time in Mitchell so far has not been utopian. We’ve had the same struggles with money and family and work that everyone goes through. But we’ve also invested in our community and our church and our friends in ways we weren’t able to do back in Arkansas. As a result, we’ve received much more than we’ve given.
That never would have happened if we’d stayed tourists. We had to become pilgrims.
For my family, that transformation meant a physical move, nearly a thousand miles away from where we started. That’s often been the case for us, and likely will be again someday. But shifting from tourist to pilgrim doesn’t require a change of zip code or employment or marital status. It simply requires us to reject the stressed-out, locked-down, messed-up patterns that pass for life in our day and age.
Pilgrimage starts not with knowing the end of the journey, but with a commitment to traveling a different way. And when you do, home finds you in the strangest of places.
