A missionary friend recently quoted JRR Tolkien to me: not everyone who wanders is lost.

As someone who can barely go a year without coming down with an itch to travel, this quote speaks to me. I'm self-aware enough to know that there's an aspect of the grass is greener syndrome involved, but that's a minor ingredient.

I could blame my parents. No one can put a 6-month old on an international flight and not expect the experience to get under their skin. And they didn't stop there -- we criss-crossed the country several times before I was in high school. We once spent an entire summer trolling up and down the east coast in a motorhome while my dad promoted real estate seminars. It was the summer before eighth grade and, at the time, I was wildly interested in the Civil War. We went to every battlefield we could get to and I spent hours constructing battle scenes with toy soldiers and cannons.

Yes, I said eighth grade...and yes, I've always been a nerd. :p

Out of curiosity, I just hopped over to dictionary.com to check out the definition of wanderlust: a very strong or irresistible impulse to travel.

Why do I love to wander? I don't know, but the itch definitely borders on the irresistible at times. This year I'll add four new stamps to my passport -- a record unsurpassed but for the year I toured most of Europe. Of course I was two at the time so it wasn't real memorable. ;)

It's just such a big world! So many people, so many scenes of beauty unfamiliar to your usual surroundings. And so much that is similar also. I remember walking in a field of grain in the Ukraine as a 19-year-old and feeling a sense of unreality as I could have been walking in any of several Midwestern states.

Traveling anywhere in Europe can make an American feel like a child. You see cathedrals that passed infancy before the New World was discovered -- and yet -- last April I saw Egyptian monuments that were crumbling down before those cathedrals were even on the drawing board.

I could go on and on, but Tolkien's words ring true to me as I think of the places I've been privileged to see -- not everyone who wanders is lost. The other words that ring true are written in the book of Psalms, chapter 19, verses 1-3:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.