“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here’s my heart; O take and seal it; seal it for thy courts above.”
Her name was supposed to be Gracie. That’s what my ordination class collectively decided would be the name of whatever RV I would purchase. Chase had even included a made-up story that John Wesley’s horse was named Gracie, so if I was going to embark on living the circuit rider life, I should honor our founder by naming my RV after his horse, even if not based on fact. But that’s how good stories often start anyway.
I always had a plan, though, to get a custom decal that said, “Prone to wander.” I love that hymn, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” In my head, it is a Charles Wesley hymn. However, it was apparently written by Robert Robinson, who, according to Hymnary.org, was convicted by a sermon by George Whitefield and then followed Wesley around a bit, serving as a Calvinist Methodist (what a wonderful tension of an identity) before finally becoming a Baptist minister. Knowing all that story only makes me love the hymn more.
But my wandering has been less theological and more practical. I have held fast to my Methodist understanding of grace, but life has often taken me into wandering places. While I believed in God from a very early age, I did not get baptized until I was 25. Then, by 27, I had identified a call to ministry, a call that, in retrospect, I had been wandering around for a long time. But then I dragged my feet through the mentoring process, and spent 10 years in school getting both an MDiv and a Ph.D. before I came home to start serving. A staff member of the Methodist Foundation of Arkansas who had funded much of my seminary work even remarked, “Oh, the prodigal daughter has come home!”
Then I began to live the life of an itinerant pastor, serving West Memphis on the eastern border of Arkansas, and later moved to Fort Smith on the western border. I joked that the Bishop either thought Arkansas could barely contain me or he was very close to kicking me out. Then followed a couple of years working for the Bishop in Little Rock before spending the pandemic year in Conway and finally landing in Bentonville, really close to the Northern border of my state. Bentonville has held me in place the longest – starting my sixth year –, but because of the housing crisis, I have moved 3 times in this town. And that last time was into a house on wheels.
A House Found in a Trading Guide
I found that house on wheels through an app called RV Trader. That was not my plan. How many faithful Christians have uttered those words? I planned to buy a 3-year-old RV from Cruise America once they were done renting it. I had practiced living in an RV for a couple of weeks using one of their rigs, and I thought it would work just fine. I also wanted to look at what else is out there. And then I saw her…
A 2015 Jayco Redhawk 31XL. She is a Class C, which for those of you who don’t know RV classes, here is your quick education: the ones that look like buses – Class A; the vans people can live out of – Class B; the ones that are trailers that a pickup pulls behind it – 5th wheels; and the ones that are built onto a pickup frame but that you can move from the cab of the truck all the way to the back – Class C. She had a bed above the cab, a sofa and a table that could also convert into beds, 2 twin bunks, and a full-size queen in the back. I only needed one bed, but I did need all of the storage locations the others could become. Also, she already had solar panels installed as back-up power! And she cost the same as the smaller Cruise America option. She had a lot of mileage on her, but I really wasn’t going to drive her that much anyway.
She Came With a Name
And then there was that one little detail, written in the description. “Our family came to love this RV and even named her. We call her Wanda.”
Prone to Wanda. There it was. And there it was meant to be. So Gracie became Wanda Grace, and I found my home. I found my place to live into this always-on-the-move identity, and yet to still feel grounded. May it always be that, wherever I roam, wherever I wanda, my heart is sealed in God’s courts above.
Michelle Morris is a United Methodist pastor in The Arkansas Conference. She currently lives in an RV.
She is the author of Prophets to the Generations.