After traveling for a couple of weeks, I am back to blogging, resuming my quest to share something of value and meaning to anyone who should stumble upon my meditations.  Where did I go?  Not the mountains.  My wife and I visited Eastern Europe, specifically, Romania and Albania.
     Why these countries?  As we discussed our summer plans, we thought:  why not go to regions to which most Westerners do not go?
     Although I have much to share about the trip, I begin with a night I spent talking with a group of gypsies in southern Romania.  In many ways, gypsies are modern day lepers. Despised by most people, relegated to the margins of conventional society, and desperately poor, today's gypsies pursue a life of difficulty and hardship.  As I talked (aided by a missionary friend as translator; I had learned some of the rudiments and words of the Romanian language, but certainly not enough to be fluent!), I realized that although my missionary friend had asked me to tell them how I came to embrace Christianity and Jesus, my story was a very Western one.  My story is one of living and learning in a relatively privileged white society, possessed with a freedom to pursue individual and corporate cultural hopes and political dreams which most gypsies will never have.  What can Jesus say to them?
     Simply, I soon realized, this:  ultimately, we all want to live meaningful lives. Ultimately, we all want to understand why we are here.  Ultimately, we all want to find reconciliation with our realities.  Whether we seek our answers in the affluent West or an impoverished (financially) culture in Eastern Europe is not nearly as important as that we grasp that, given our finitude and the immense existential and metaphysical mysteries in which we all move, we will not find our meaning unless we admit that we can never be our own god.  We must be, as Jesus put it so well, "born again" to really know what is real and true.  Like it or not, wherever and whoever we are, we must accept the notion of faith, a rational and thoughtful and faith, to find what life is most about.
     As I told the group, we all have a story.  We all have story of us and God.  So I ask you, what's yours?