The Sojourner

Still Traveling

Who is The Sojourner? That is both a very simple question and, increasingly, a complicated one. For purposes of this journal, The Sojourner is simply The Sojourner. She is a real woman with a real life, a real history, real relationships, real questions, and a very real faith in Jesus Christ. She has chosen not to place her name, photograph, résumé, or personal identity at the center of these pages. That is intentional. This journal isn’t meant to be about building a personality; it is about documenting a journey. And after many years of thinking she understood what that journey was supposed to look like, The Sojourner has recently begun asking a rather startling question: What if the story God is writing is larger than the picture I have been carrying?

The Sojourner did not come from abundance. There were seasons when life was measured by faith only. During those years she carried an enormous dream: she believed she was called to ministry. When she imagined that calling fulfilled, she could see it clearly—a stage, a podium, a Bible, and a message burning in her heart. That picture mattered because it gave shape to hope. But life continued. Years passed. Doors opened and closed. There were victories and disappointments, seasons of serving and seasons of waiting, things understood correctly and other things understood only much later. Somewhere along the road, the scenery changed.

The woman who once looked intensely toward the future noticed some things she’d breezed by in the past. Amazed, she noted things she had done. She traveled. She discovered photography. She stood on ships looking across enormous oceans. She snorkeled off Puerto Rico and explored the old forts of San Juan. She bivouacked beneath Alaskan skies, trekked through the rugged Colorado mountains, water-skied across Florida lakes, and traveled through America’s original thirteen colonies. These weren’t photographs in somebody else’s travel book. She was there. She saw the mountains, felt the cold air, looked beneath Caribbean waters into another world, walked through history, crossed borders, laughed, learned, traveled, and accumulated a lifetime of experiences that she had sometimes scarcely stopped long enough to appreciate. She had become so accustomed to looking toward the life she hoped would someday begin that she sometimes failed to recognize that she was already living one.

And yet somewhere inside remained the woman looking for the podium.

Recently, The Sojourner began examining her story from another perspective. Instead of looking backward primarily through questions such as What went wrong? What did I fail to accomplish? Why didn’t life look like the picture I carried?, she began asking something very different: What might this life look like through the eyes of Jesus? That question has begun changing things. Perhaps some memories she had filed under insignificant were actually gifts. Perhaps some detours were not detours at all. Perhaps enjoyment does not automatically mean compromise, prosperity need not produce guilt, and ministry does not always require a microphone. Perhaps the calling was real while her picture of its fulfillment was simply too small. And perhaps learning to look backward correctly is necessary if she is going to walk forward freely.

The Sojourner calls this her mind reset. It is still underway, and you are reading it while it happens.

The Sojourner is a Christian. She believes in Jesus Christ, the authority of Scripture, the present work of the Holy Spirit, prayer, spiritual gifts, healing, and the authority Christ has given His Church. She has a particular passion for studying the authority of the believer and what it means for ordinary Christians to understand who they are in Christ and live accordingly. But faith has not caused her to stop asking questions. Quite the opposite. She wants to understand what she believes and why she believes it. What does Scripture actually say? What have we added through tradition? Where have fear, culture, religious legalism, personal experience, or somebody else’s opinion quietly become indistinguishable from the voice of God? Where has she underestimated what God has said? And where might enthusiasm have carried an idea farther than Scripture actually takes it?

Those are questions worth asking, so she asks them. The Professor has learned to keep the library lights on.

There is also freedom in allowing the writing to stand without requiring the writer to stand in front of it. The Sojourner lives among people she loves, works among ordinary people, travels, takes photographs, laughs, learns, makes mistakes, and goes about a life that does not need to become public property simply because she has something to say. Some people close to her know about this journey. Most do not, and that is okay. Anonymity here is not intended to create a false identity; it creates enough quiet for honesty. She wants to wrestle with an idea without wondering what an acquaintance will think, and she wants to tell the truth about growth without turning other people’s private lives into public material. Details may therefore occasionally be changed, generalized, or omitted to protect people who never volunteered to become characters in somebody else’s journal. The point is not to hide behind a name. It is to remove the name from center stage.

There is another reason this journal exists. The Sojourner has realized that if she waits until she is completely healed, completely knowledgeable, completely mature, completely certain, completely organized, and completely finished before she has anything useful to offer another person, she is going to be waiting a very long time—probably forever. None of us ministers from perfection. Sometimes the person beside us doesn’t need someone standing triumphantly at the finish line shouting instructions. Sometimes she simply needs someone a little farther up the same road calling back, “I just found something. Come look at this.”

That is the kind of ministry The Sojourner hopes can happen here. Not Look at me, but look what we are discovering.

For many years, The Sojourner thought she knew what the great fulfillment of her life would look like. Today she is less certain of the picture and, strangely, more hopeful about the future. She is learning that surrendering an old image does not necessarily mean surrendering the calling underneath it. Perhaps the podium will appear. Perhaps the page itself is one. Perhaps ministry will take forms she does not yet possess enough imagination to see. She is learning not to demand the photograph before agreeing to take the journey. Scripture says, “For we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7), and so she keeps walking—with Jesus, with her Bible, with a camera occasionally hanging from her shoulder, with questions tucked into every available pocket, and, these days, with a peculiar AI Professor somewhere nearby furiously pulling books from shelves.

The Sojourner does not know exactly what the next chapter will look like. But she knows something she once desperately needed to understand:

The story is not over. Perhaps, in some extraordinary way, it is only beginning.