Life is a journey with a beginning and a destination.
This document follows the journey of Jesus as viewed by John, a fisherman plying his trade on the Lake of Galilee over 2,000 years ago. This is his account of journeying with a stranger, who approached him to be one of his original resources to start a new fishing business: catching people instead of fish! The result is a lively account of two interlocked journeys – John and Jesus – that touch on every aspect of personal development we face in our journey through life. Relating their journeys with our own can give new insights on how we are currently travelling in our life. Some insights can be like suddenly switching on a light that dramatically transforms our ability to see new possibilities for our future, up to and including the ultimate destination we are choosing.
Each person, whatever their age, is on their unique journey owned only by them. Even if we try to pass this ownership to another person, it remains with us. Our unique journey begins at birth. We have no say about when it begins, or the two genetic maps from which our own will be uniquely composed. Our starting gene pool has no copy. Nor do we determine the unique mix of sensory inputs projected onto “infant us” in our earliest years by doting or nervous parents, and welcoming or threatened siblings now facing competition for parental attention and affection.
Our view of reality develops as our brain interprets the varieties of neural inputs it receives each moment from our environment through our five physical senses – eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin. Emotional responses develop in us as our brain interprets these neural inputs from our physical environment. Those physical neural inputs themselves are coloured with a variety of emotions directed toward us that we have to learn to interpret as we encounter our world. The most powerful of these inputs is love and how it moulds the fresh “infant us”. Its presence creates a wholesome and durable self-image. Its absence weakens and distorts self-image. Love continues by its presence or absence to be the most impacting input of all on our life journey from its start to its destination.
The “infant us” comes to recognise how love is communicated to us through the variety of physical expressions of our parents and close family. We also learn to recognise what is not love through a variety of other responses from an ever expanding collection of acquaintances on our journey from nursery school to employment. We learn to navigate through this constantly shifting emotional terrain captured by our five physical senses and soon develop an understanding of what people or experiences, make us feel good, and those which create hurt and other negative emotions. Thus, we develop our emotion created, navigation map of relationships. We begin to recognise those who come into our life with the attitude that they own us, in order to extract what they want from us subtly or ferociously, and we gravitate to the few whose love can be trusted to seek our best always. But the ultimate decisions of what we want from life at any moment are ours. Accordingly, we steadily develop our set of sensory-initiated, emotionally-influenced, reinforcement and avoidance behaviours as we chart our unique pathway through life as neurally-informed, social beings.
If our understanding of reality, and the meaning of our life, stays in this physical and social domain, then we have not yet journeyed to a discovery of self, which has been designed to flourish in an infinitely expansive reality beyond the limited understanding of reality that we garnish from physical inputs. From its beginning, John’s account of journeying with Jesus introduces a spiritual reality infinitely greater than the outer reaches of our universe, learning and love. May you be enlivened by the discoveries of new life-changing spiritual realities as you join John’s journey with Jesus.