Why the Meandering?

I grew up in a little town in North Dakota, called Maddock.  A few miles south of the town was the Sheyenne River.  It wasn’t much of a river, but it was the only one we had.

When I was quite young my Dad would grab our bamboo fishing poles and we would head to the river, just like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, or Andy Griffith and Opie.  The only thing we ever caught were bullheads.  Man, were they ugly.  I didn’t dare take them off the line.  And eating them was out of the question.

Anyway, the Sheyenne, like most rivers, was anything but straight.  In fact, this would come in handy when I was much older.  In the fall we would take our shotguns down to the river to hunt ducks.  We would sneak around the bends and try to surprise the ducks.
Most of the time the ducks were smarter than we were, but once in awhile we would get lucky.

Back to my Dad.  It was from him that I first heard the word “meandering.”  That is how Dad described the Sheyenne.  It just meandered here and there, without any, as we say, “rhyme or reason.”  The Beatles wrote a song about the “long and winding road.”  Well, Dad could have said the “winding” river, but he said the “meandering” river.

According to the dictionary, meandering can mean a “winding course” or an “aimless wandering.”  I like the former better than the latter, at least when it comes to the spirituality of my life.

Like a river, our lives are also not “straight-line.”  There are ups and downs, hills and valleys, right turns and left turns.  Often we feel like we have no idea where we are going.  But, like Gerhard Frost (last blog) we trust that these twists and turns will eventually take us home.  Our task along this journey is to reflect on and find meaning in the wandering, the meandering.  Our tasks is to find meandering spirituality.