Getting on the Ferry to at Horseshoe Bay, BC

It’s beautiful here.  I’m on Bowen Island, a twenty minute ride on a ferry from Vancouver.  In some ways, yesterday was one of the days of easiest travel I’ve experienced since 9/11.  Before the day was over, I had flown for 7 1/2 hour, ridden a train, a Vancouver metro bus, a ferry and I had walked in the rain.  So it was also a day filled with a sense of adventure.

When I got to the airport in Vancouver, I met up with others attending this conference including Keith Oglesby, an Episcopal priest who serves a church in Cumming, Georgia. Keith was also the Vice President of Sales for the FedEx Latin America and Caribbean Division in Miami when I was also working with FedEx LAC so we knew each other back then.  At dinner last night, we had a wonderful discussion about the lasting ways in which our FedEx experience has shaped our ministry.  Connection and community and the discovery of a new-old friend.

Then we did some group work that in some respects was the total opposite of our dinner conversation.  While Keith and I had talked about the kind of clarity and accountability we sometimes miss from our corporate days and laughed at how we keep trying to measure the impact of what we do in ministry, the discussion was framed with this question:  “What is the deepest longing that brought you here today?”  I sat at a table with someone who talked at some length about the song Dust in the Wind which I blogged about here a few months ago.  Somehow the conversation then morphed into the connection between longing and belonging and in one of those moments of clarity that are only possible when you started your morning at 4:00 and now your watch, still on EDT,  says it’s 12:30 the following morning, it struck me.

I keep reflecting on the whole notion of home and I have recently come to the conclusion that for me the path is home. That’s why I adore these outings and little adventures.  So it seemed to me last night that the path is the wind.  Being a small speck of dust carried by the wind is a strangely comforting image, quite unexpectedly.  I ran into Keith after 12 years and that, only after having hardly known him at FedEx. Last night, talking about the SFA and vestries (and only a FedExer would know what I mean and it’s too long and boring to explain)  there was a sense of being at home and belonging.  I sort of like that new idea–a child of the wind.