There's plenty of freedom offered in the open-ended question, "What do you want?" but the answer of the first disciples is a good guide to the place the question will ultimately take us if we let it: "Rabbi, where are you staying?"
As "what do you want" does it's work in our souls, we ultimately find that we want things that can't just be delivered to us. We want security, identity, purpose, healing, transformation--so much is broken, including us. We need a bigger story to make sense out of our story, out of all of these broken stories.
The controversial story of Jesus is the place where we find the healing, renewing, and hope that we long for. The disciples speak better than they know: the response-question "where are you staying?" best answers the question "what do you want?" The brokenness cannot be satiated by stuff or by the drowsy "big man in the sky" bailing me out of the crisis of the week. Our longings can only begin to be truly met as we weave our story in with this grander story. That weaving in is a process, not a one-time event. Where are you staying? is a question of relationship, of familiarity, of wanting to be where the teacher is, the Lord is, the Life-Giver is.
The Dave Matthews Band has a great song that captures something of this. Although the relationship is clearly man-woman and not us-God, it captures something of this story:
I am no superman, I have no answers for you.
I am no hero, oh, that’s for sure.
But I do know one thing: Where you are is where I belong.
I do know where you go, Is where I want to be.
Where are you going?
No pretense as to our ability to bring anything to the table. No grandiose promises of what we will do for God. No promises to make ourselves better people to make God like us better. Just this simple coming in brokenness. All I know is that where you are is where I belong, is where I want to be. So where are you going?
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