This is the first step of a journey of a thousand miles - the first entry of a blog whose end is beyond the horizon. Who knows where it will take me, or you, if you've somehow stumbled upon it in the matrix of the internet? Who knows where a journey of a thousand miles will lead you? Even if you land at your destination point, by the time you finish a journey of a thousand miles things are not always what you imagined and you are not what you imagined either.

My children returned to school last week. My wife and I have triplets, two identical twin girls and a boy. They rule the roost this year, 5th graders in elementary school. As we sat in an unusually long car pool line, waiting behind kindergarten parents parking their cars in whatever open space they could find so they could walk their first-dayers inside, my kids asked me if we walked them inside on their first day of kindergarten.

"No," I replied, "We practiced a few days before school started. We were confident you knew where your class was. When the time came you hopped out of the van like you'd done it a million times." I kept looking back in the rear view mirror as I talked and pictured that day when they looked like three ducklings in a row wattling with hanging bookbags towards the school doors. Now, they look so big, on the verge on their teen years. I could have never imagined that 5 years later they would look like this, that their personalities would grow so strong and independent. Sometimes when I see high schoolers I wonder if my three will be like them in a few years. Style their hair like that, wear those clothes, talk like that. In a journey of a thousand miles you can only see a few steps ahead of you. The rest you see with a mixture of hope and faith and sometimes love.

When you walk with someone on a journey of a thousand miles, you don't notice the incremental changes in them nor in yourself. It's the visiting grandparent or cousin that notices the accumulated changes.

The same experience occurs on a faith journey of a thousand miles. The incremental changes one step at a time goes unnoticed. It's only when you return to your home church after years of being away, or you enter into a religious conversation at a family reunion that you realize the accumulated changes.

Or maybe you don't notice the changes, because your journey stopped at some point. Maybe mile 433 after your pastor was fired and you quit going to church. Or Mile 128 after someone explained the beliefs in the Apostles' Creed; you agreed with em, so why ask any more questions.

It is the questions, I think, the searching, the struggles that keep us walking down the road of faith. And that's where this blog will be dedicated - to faithful questioning. Abelard's Notebook, named in reference to the 11th century theologian, whose most famous book, Sic et No, researched 158 church doctrines and found where either scripture or early church authorities on the one had said, "Yes," and on the other hand said, "No." It's no wonder that some of Abelard's books were burned and he was imprisoned for his teachings. But while the Church did not appreciate his questioning nature, his students adored him.

If you are looking for neatly tied-up answers, this is probably not your place. But if you are intrigued by the Sic et No of faith, the nuances, the mystery of taking one more step down a journey of a thousand miles, join the caravan. One warning: there's no telling where you'll end up.