where have you actually been?

Facebookers have recently begun circulating a do-it-yourself map of the US, colored to show where you've visited and lived. It's always interesting to find stuff like that out about your friends, but there's something odd about it too.

When you've visited California, the state of California gets filled in. But what if you only lived in San Diego for 5 years and never left the city limits?

Which leads us to the intriguing question, where have you actually been?

Catherine and I regularly express gratitude that we've seen so much of the world — Thailand, Panama, Scotland, England, Austria, China, France — but what if we only colored in the cities that we'd been to, and not just the countries? What if we only showed the routes?

What would our life in San Antonio look like, even? No more than several spots on the north-ish side and downtown, with a few narrow roads running between. I remember reading a critique of Fiesta that mentioned that one of the Fiesta Kings, King Antonio (selected by and from moneyed Anglos), whose week-long duties include visiting tons of schools all over San Antonio, would be seeing the south and west sides of town for likely the first and last time in his life, though these kings are always lifelong residents. Well, what criticism is that, really? Though it sounds ideal to know your city in all its multivaried glory, how many of us really do anything close? We all have our beaten paths, even in the places we think of as our well-worn homes.

It all makes you realize that no matter how much of the world you see, you'll never ever see more than a tiny fraction of what there really is. The most well-traveled among us are, like Thor in Utgard, imbibing huge amounts of the vast ocean but only lowering it a half-inch.

Here's to the impossible, to seeing and hearing and tasting — experiencing, knowing — all of God's tapestry, all the points and points-between-two-points, whether a continent or your own postage-stamp neighborhood, or the uncharted corners of your self.