The Adventurer

So I was praying for some of my mates out here the other day, and I started praying about adventures. We pretty much all came here looking for an adventure. Something bigger, and better, and more epic and more exciting than whatever we had at home. The verb, to adventure, apparently means: “to engage in hazardous and exciting activity, especially the exploration of unknown territory”. And that’s definitely what we’re doing – an unknown continent, so much excitement, and much more hazardousness than I tell my mum about. And it is immensely good fun. Because fear and excitement, difficulty and satisfaction, disappointment and glory, stick to each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Every single surprise, stab of pain or flood of joy, makes us a little bit more alive. “Hazardous and exciting activity in unknown territory” – isn’t that what life is?

Anyway, I wasn’t praying about adventure because of that, because of where we are or what we came for or what we’ve got. I was praying about adventure because of the hunger. Because I can feel in the friends out here with me the hunger for something epic. For an adventure big enough to make being alive worth living for. And I was praying because I’ve stumbled across that adventure, fallen down that rabbit hole.

I was looking at this bit at the start of John’s biography of Jesus where he’s ‘calling’ his first followers. I’d read it a couple of weeks ago but I’d ignored the awesomeness because I was reading it like “THE BIBLE” and not like a book, or a film script. But I read it again and I realised how cool Jesus is. These two guys come up to him, and ask him where he’s staying. He just says, “Come, and you will see.” And a bit of me just imagines him grinning, turning on his heels and sprinting, and them chasing after him like Simba chasing Rafiki in that jungle in the Lion King. And then, like he did loads more times, Jesus comes across this guy, Phillip, just minding his own business, probably fishing, and says, “Follow me.” No explanation, no details, no indication of a plan or dinner or a bed, just the promise of an adventure. And Phillip is so excited somehow by the sheer charisma, the sheer presence of this Adventurer, that he runs off to get his mate Nathaniel. And when he’s walking towards Jesus, Jesus starts telling him things about him that there’s no way he could possibly know, he just casually drops in where he was standing when Phillip found him, and Nathaniel is gobsmacked. And Jesus, not satisfied to impress him with stuff he understands, says pretty much, “You think that’s awesome? You will see things much greater than that. You know what? You will see heaven open and the angels of God rising and falling on the Son of Man.” And then, I reckon, “Confused? Thought so. Come on.”

Jesus just turns up out of nowhere, and says, “I’m going on an adventure, you coming?”  He’s like Sherlock, or actually more like Doctor Who, he’s talking about stuff and it’s amazing but you don’t understand, and you don’t know the plan, and it doesn’t make any sense to you; but you trust him that whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to be good. He stands in front of you like Neo in the Matrix and says, “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” He doesn’t tell you it’s going to be safe, or easy. He assures you that you might die. That it might hurt. That you might have to leave everything you’ve ever had and everything you’ve ever known. He tells you that to go where he’s going, you’ll have to hand over the steering wheel to him. And the accelerator, and the brake. But there’s something inside telling you that being in total control is not that different to being dead. Something telling you to drop everything, and obey the whisper, “Hold on tight.”

And so you take the red pill. You step into the tardis. You jump down the rabbit hole.

And the adventure begins.