"a spy, or whatever you prefer to call it"

I recently watched The Bourne Identity and really liked it. I remember starting to read the book and not being very impressed, but the movie was much better. The relationship between the lead characters, a man and woman thrown together trying to survive and escape their pursuers, was especially appealing.

I've always found spy stories strangely attractive. A few years ago, during one of my long walks, I wrote this in my journal:

Reading another John LeCarre novel (The Honorable Schoolboy)—I really like his books: intelligent, realistic spy stories. This passage caught my eye:

Some people are agents from birth, he told them, appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first: “Whether it’s us, whether it’s the opposition, or whether it’s the bloody missionaries.”

Kierkegaard also compared the Christian life to being a spy or God’s agent in the world [in Training in Christianity]:

[The God-relationship] must be for every individual man the absolute, and it is precisely this God-relationship of the individual which must put every established order in suspense, so that God, at any instant He will, by pressure upon the individual has immediately in his God-relationship a witness, a reporter, a spy, or whatever you prefer to call it, one who in unconditional obedience, or by unconditional obedience, by persecution, suffering, and death, puts the established order in suspense.

I think that imagery is accurate. Much more so than the “Upstanding Christian Citizen.”

I’m also feeling again the appeal of being on the road. Things are rapidly put back into perspective. The “God’s agent” feeling is more pronounced. And I’m seeing more and more how this plays into other relationships and service to people (when I’m not walking).

Often people ask if I will “settle down.” I’m having a hard time seeing much value in that. Settle down? Jesus didn’t. Neither did Paul. Maybe part of what I like about the spy stories are people who have higher priorities in life than the security of a home and a fixed income.

Now I ask myself if I've changed, if I'm trying to settle down after all. I think I have been trying to at times during this past year, but have been prevented from doing so.

Maybe that's a mercy. Maybe God won't let me settle down too much, and maybe I should remember that that's a part of following Jesus. And embrace it.