What a beautiful day this has been: high 70s and balmy, with a passing breeze brought on by occasional thundershowers. Pennsylvania's spring days are, I can confirm, far nicer than Maine's, where it regularly snows well into April. The beginning of May up there is not safe, either; my birthday is the 2nd, and I've more than once blown out candles while ivory precipitation piled up outside.

This birthday will mark my second full year in the Keystone State, or near enough to make no difference (I moved here in the third week of May, 2006). The adventure has turned out to be nothing like what I expected it to be--although perhaps I should say it's turned out to be exactly what I expected it to be, but nothing like I desired. The situation I came into down here at first was, quite frankly, ludicrous, as was the reason for coming at all; and yet here I am. How good people are at lying to themselves! I've always thought it strange how we can be completely prescient of the inevitable end to a given road and yet still choose its dubious pavement, even when we know the road is, at best, the wrong way. I suppose we are, by nature, restless creatures, and whether we see it or not, we look for God and happiness however we can. We would not be restless, nor indeed even people, were we able to make the right choices with every choosing, and I believe it's fair to say that it's the misadventures themselves that make finding the right road both possible and rewarding.

There are times when I think that our lives are much like the story of Moses and the Hebrews from Exodus: lost, wandering, frustrated and angry at our inability to find what we're looking for. The Hebrews were looking for their promised land, while we individually are, perhaps, looking for something not so different--for prosperity and happiness are just as linked to the people you love as to the land wherein you live. Are we not always searching for the rare souls who seem to cause us a sort of elemental joy?

The answer is, of course, no...sort of, anyway. We're always searching, but perhaps not always aware of the search. Like Moses and his flock, we get frustrated with our failures, and have a tendency to turn aside, to entertain distractions, to settle for something less. We concede defeat and resign ourselves to despair, thinking nothing will ever work out for us--a grievous sin, and not so different from pride. Pride is, after all, in the end an admission of superiority over God, and what is despair but a claim that our failures are so complete that not even He can rescue us from them? A sort of twisted inverse-pride, I guess. In any case, the point remains that we must never give up the search for our own little promised lands, no matter how grim that search may become. The land flowing with milk and honey wouldn't be quite so wondrous without having first trekked through all the many lands of desolation and emptiness.

But the real question is, what do you do when you think you've found that land? How can you know? You can't, obviously, and it's hubristic to think you can. A friend of mine is fond of saying that there may be love at first sight, but the mechanic doesn't necessarily indicate the existence of only one person for whom you can feel love at first sight. There are no doubt thousands and thousands of "promised lands" for every given man and woman. The sad fact of the matter, however, is that oftentimes we may think we've found what we've been looking for, and that may even be true--but the final say isn't really yours. During their journey, the Hebrews found many places they thought to be the promised land, and would have been happy to call home; but God moved them on. I think we are no different, and that it is madness (and incredibly prideful) to believe we can make a given plot of ground, however lovely, our own promised place by means of desire and will. That decision is as much the land's as it is ours.

Which, again, brings up the question: how do you know when you've found what you've been looking for? I'm pretty sure the answer is, quite simply, you don't know. You can have collected a world's worth of certainty in your heart, and still not have a tenth of a fraction of influence over the process. Relationships with people we care about are, really, quite like our relationships with God: we can hold every card in the deck, but He's still got the trump.

As Alexander Dumas said in The Count of Monte Cristo, all we can do is wait, and hope.