The meaning behind the title

So what is a Wandering Mystic?  What is a Mythological Liar? 

I don’t know.  I had to come up with a title for this blog.  And unfortunately that was the first cool sounding set of words I could come up with.  But honestly, I believe there is something deep inside my soul that connects with these words and that is why they came to be here in this place, at this time.  So I may as well try to unpack them so we can go on with our lives.  Cue the lights and start the music.  I have a feeling this could get overly dramatic in a hurry.

I am not home and I have never felt like I have been.  I am just a poor wandering soul on this rock.  I’m not homeless by any means.  I have a place to stay, a bed to sleep in, and a roof over my head.  I’m one of the lucky ones.  But that is different then being home.  I have never really connected with anywhere that I have lived.  I can feel just as connected in a hotel room in Aspen, Colorado as I can in the house that I own in Hartsburg, Missouri.  While sleeping under a million stars in Copper Canyon in the middle of desolate Mexico I have felt more connected than I have in my own bed.

Am I crazy?  Am I stupid?  No, I am just not connected.  Part of that is I have a hard time with relationships.  I recognize that aspect of myself and I am working on that.  The lack of strong relationships with those around you will cause you to experience a huge disconnect with where you are.  People keep you grounded.

But also a part of this equation is that I just know that I am not home yet.  I dream about living in Ireland, but that is not my home either.  That would just be another map point on this journey.  I have an even deeper longing for a world that I have never seen.  My heart yearns for eternity.  You may not believe in eternity.  There are days I struggle to believe that there is more than what I see and feel.  I know that someday in the future my soul will get off this rock and I will be home.  It really doesn’t matter where my feet walk, and it definitely won’t matter where you bury my body.  And until that point, I wander.

I know that a lot of people don’t like the word mystic.  Many of my traditional Christian friends especially don’t like the title.  But I love it.  To me, God and Heaven are not things that I can easily explain.  I can’t sit down with you over a cup of coffee and lay out the infinite characteristics of God and all of the wonders that He has created.  To me, God is mystical, magical, miraculous, and so much more.

And I call myself a mystic because I am simply just a wandering soul who searches to discover the beauty and power in the mystical nature of God.  God can never be put into a box.  In truth, a god in a box is no god at all.  And our God has given us so many signs and wonders to point to who He is.  All we have to do is allow ourselves to look and see what is there.  If we will search the Bible and search His creation we will discover and see His glory.

One of my favorite essays by a Christian theologian was Jonathan Edwards’s writings on spiders.  Here is one of the greatest thinkers in all of Christianity and he spends his time in a field looking at spiders.  That’s my kind of theologian.  That is mystical.  And that is who I am.  I am the guy staring at the fire.  I am the guy staring at the stars.  I am the guy who loves walking through forests, and up and down mountains.  I love to watch water flow down a river.  Because in all of those things I can see the one who created them.

Everything in my mind is bigger than reality.  I am the guy who caught the three foot catfish when I was twelve.  That was thirty-two years ago.  Was it really three feet long?  It seemed like that when I was holding it up to show my Granddad and my Great-Uncle.  My Uncle Walter had talked about that catfish in his pond for as long as I could remember.  And that one summer night I was the lucky kid to haul it onto the bank.  My Aunt Becky grabbed the fish from my Uncle, who wanted to throw it back into the pond so he could try and catch it later, and she cooked it up that night so we could feast.

Now when I tell the story in person you would think that the fish I was describing was the killer whale from Free Willy.  The fish is mythological in its representation and in my presentation.  My wife tells me all the time that I am being too dramatic.  I don’t tell my kids to wash the dishes; I unleash a Shakespearian soliloquy upon them to render their hearts and minds useless in resisting my decrees.  So yeah, I am mythological in nature.

And last but not least I am a liar.  I don’t mean that the story about the fish wasn’t true.  I really did catch a catfish at my Uncle Walter’s pond.  And it was big, and we did eat it.  What I mean is that I don’t want you to know my true self.  I am scared to know the truth of what you think of me.  I place a lot of my own personal value on what others think of me.  If others think I am great, I feel great.  If others think I am worthless, I feel worthless.  So I do my best to deceive you to protect my heart.

It’s not so much that I lie, as much as it is that I hide.  If you don’t know the real me, then you will like me and I will feel valuable and experience meaning and purpose.  But that is the real lie.

You see, we all are wandering mystics on this rock.  We are searching for our connection to the great mysteries of this world and it’s Creator.  We all want to experience the glory and the power of eternity.  Deep inside we long for it and that is why we struggle and feel miserable when we don’t satisfy that longing with the material things of this world.

And to some degree we are all mythological liars.  We make ourselves and our deeds bigger than truth in order to hide our failures and weaknesses.  It’s human nature to do so.  We need to have purpose and meaning in our lives.  We need to feel valuable.  So we create a reality around us to satisfy those needs.

I will say this; it’s nice to live exposed for who I really am.  I am a Wandering Mystic, and a Mythological Liar.  To live without the mask and to just be what I am is a great way to live.  As Popeye would say, “I am what I am and that’s all that I am”.  I have found a lot of grace as I open up and expose my true nature.  I pray that you will experience that as well.