I Wander As I Wander: When Your Feet Keep Moving But Your Heart Isn’t Home Yet

There’s a phrase that has been turning over in my heart—one you might recognize, though not quite in the form you learned it. We know the old carol, “I Wonder as I Wander.” But somewhere along the way, in the wilderness seasons of my own life, it became this: “I wander as I wander.”

Not poetic. But painfully true. Because there are seasons in faith when your feet move forward, your life looks functional, your faith is still intact… but inside, you’re wandering. You’re wondering. You’re unsure. You’re not falling apart, but you’re not settled either. You’re saved, but not always steady. You’re moving, but not always anchored.

There’s a moment in Scripture that has always touched something deep in me—something human, something honest, something that sounds a lot like the quiet place where most of us actually live. It’s that line in Deuteronomy where God gently says to His people, “You have stayed long enough at this mountain.” You can almost hear the tenderness in it, and a little sadness too. It’s the voice of a Father who has watched His children walk the same circle over and over again, long after they needed to.

And if we’re being truthful, we know what that feels like. Most of us don’t step straight from deliverance into joy. We come away from our Egypts—whatever they happen to be—and at first we’re grateful just to be out. But then life settles. Old habits rise again. Familiar fears whisper. We find ourselves thinking, “Why am I here again? Didn’t I pray about this already? Haven’t I walked this path before?” And God, with a patience that still surprises me, says what He once said to Israel: “You’ve stayed here long enough.”

The story of the wilderness wasn’t written for Israel alone. It was written for every believer who has discovered that the journey from bondage to freedom isn’t a straight line. It’s a wandering kind of journey. A growing kind of journey. A learning and unlearning kind of journey. It’s a journey where God isn’t merely leading us forward; He’s leading us inward—into the parts of our hearts that have been shaped more by Egypt than by Him.

Think about the Israelites. God got them out of Egypt in one night, but it took years for Egypt to get out of them. And the strange thing is, the distance from where they stood to where God wanted to take them was only eleven days. That always amazes me. Eleven days. And yet that little stretch of desert turned into forty long years.

It wasn’t the miles. It wasn’t the heat. It wasn’t the terrain. The real wilderness wasn’t under their feet—it was inside their minds. They didn’t wander forty years because the path was unclear, but because their hearts were. They knew how to leave a place, but they didn’t know how to enter one. They knew how to walk away from chains, but not how to walk toward promises.

And that is where their story becomes ours.

The truth is, you can be saved—genuinely saved—without really living like a free person. You can know Jesus and still carry an old heaviness in your thinking. You can walk with God and still circle the same emotional mountains over and over again. You can have your Red Sea behind you and still feel as if the wilderness has never quite left you alone.

I’ve met believers like that. And I’ve been one myself. People who love God with sincerity, yet quietly confess, “There has to be more than this. I’ve known Him for years… so why do I feel like I’m still wandering?”

There’s a reason. Most of the time, it isn’t a lack of faith—it’s a lack of vision. Not the kind of vision that sees the future, but the kind that sees yourself the way God sees you. When Israel looked ahead, they didn’t see a life God had prepared—they saw danger. When they looked back, they remembered slavery more clearly than miracles. When they looked around, they noticed sand, hunger, dryness, difficulty. They judged God’s heart by their circumstances instead of the other way around.

And quietly, gently, that can happen to us too.

We get used to a certain way of thinking. We become accustomed to old memories. We make peace with an inner heaviness and call it “normal.” Without realizing it, we settle into the wilderness and make it home. We speak desert language without thinking about it: “Things never change,” “This is just who I am,” “I’ll always struggle with this,” “This is my life,” “I guess I’m stuck here.” The wilderness begins to shape our vocabulary, and then it shapes our expectations, and then—eventually—it shapes our faith.

But what if God is saying something different over your life today? What if the Spirit is tugging at you the way He tugged at Israel, not with condemnation, not with impatience, but with a steady invitation: “Child, you’ve been circling this long enough. I want to take you forward.”