Dear Friends,

Eric is home on Spring Break. Like all college students, he has become blatantly nomadic hitting the road between school and home at the beginning and end of each break. He changed dorms at the end of the fall semester in favor of the newer men's dorm on campus. Next year, he hopes to get on the Japanese floor of the language dorm. So it goes with college life: packing up every few months and hitting the road again with semestral rhythm.
It may seem to be a necessary reality of college life to those of us not directly involved in formal education because post graduation life brings a completely new set of realities: careers, settled homes, young family et al. However, I have to wonder if Eric's status as a college student is really an overt expression of how all of us live regardless of our life stage. After all, we dwell in the company of nomads.
For the longest time I thought of nomads as a primitive people aimlessly wandering from place to place, going with the flow, if you will, in search of a place to pitch their tents or the American cowboy drifting "from one range to the next on the back of a horse." I no longer view nomads in those lights. Nomads journey with a sense of purpose and a vision of who they are. Nomads are more than willing to pull up stakes when circumstances shift.
Even in our settled way of life, we use nomadic language with phrases such as "life's journey" or faith's journey..." Cramer and I unwittingly gave our son a nomadic name. Eric literally means "noble wanderer." Synonyms for nomad include wanderer, migrant, vagabond, drifter. For the purpose of my note to you this week, I use nomad metaphorically rather than literally. I do not intend to inspire you to sneak into the nearest railroad yard to hop on the next train out of town and "ride the rails."
I think God expects us to be responsive to the world of changing realities with which he has blessed us. Intellectual nomads, for example, seek to broaden the horizons of their minds, to expand the strong foundation of their wisdom. Spiritual nomads do not flit from one best selling fad to another, but instead seek a deeper and more profound relationship with God and their neighbor.
We may wonder why God made the odd selection of Israel - a tiny nation of nomads - to be the "Chosen People. As it turned out God's choice was a people who were (reluctantly) ready to change. Consider also the nomatic theme of what Jesus said about storing treasures on earth (Mt. 6:19) where moth and rust consume. Moths eat unused cloth and rust corrodes only metals that are not maintained. In the company of nomads we discover that we are far less likely to become stagnate and vulnerable to the decay of rust and more inspire to keep pace with a dynamic God who does not stand still.