Yes, I stole this title from the book written by Jack Kerouac. Not only because I just finished reading it again, but also because Kerouac’s travel experiences intersect with my own at points. During this month, I found his journey across the United States interweaving with my journey across northern Chile. I littered quotes from the book throughout this post to depict this parallelism, albeit separated by generations.
My team’s ministry for this month was Unsung Heroes, meaning that our goal was to find new contacts for future opportunities with The World Race. I had been dreading this month since the moment I heard about the program, because I imagined a vague(abond) existence full of aimlessness, wondering and wandering.
The sun began to get red. Nothing had been accomplished. What was there to accomplish?
I feared not having a set schedule or plans. I feared not having a specific way to track accomplishments. I feared wasting time and money.
And me swearing for all the time and the money I’d wasted, and telling myself, I wanted to go west and here I’ve been all day and into the night going up and down, north and south, like something that can’t get started.
I started off the month by sleeping overnight on a restaurant booth in the Santiago airport. I bought a three dollar Snickers in my delirium, faintly noting that Chile was incredibly expensive. Our food budget equaled four dollars per person per day.
I hadn’t slept in so long I got too tired to curse and fuss and went off to sleep; I curled up on the seat with my canvas bag for a pillow, and slept till eight o’clock in the morning among the dreamy murmurs and noises of the station and of hundreds of people passing.
Our team plan changed immediately when we were directed to split up on Day One. Holley and I went to Los Andes while the others stayed in Santiago. To my delight (a schedule!) and my team’s dismay (a schedule), the Los Andes pastor set up meetings for us with interested contacts in the northern area.
It made me think that everything was about to arrive—the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.
However, we still had a week before our first planned meeting. In the meantime, 15 people on my squad stayed in an eight-person room of a very cheap, poorly-run hostel. It was crowded, dirty, freezing and frustrating.
None of us knew what was going on, or what the Good Lord appointed.
Due to my resistance to “chilly” puns and the extreme temperature change, I contracted a cold that lasted for a couple weeks. Thinking was hard since my brain transformed into an enormous booger. I hardly slept for three days because of the absence of a fan and presence of reggaeton. I was exhausted and angry, longing to be alone for once in 2016.
I was out of my mind with hunger and bitterness.
My team spent nearly two days in McDonald’s because it was relatively inexpensive and had Wi-Fi. Our primary task was survival: Where should we sleep? What can we eat? How can we afford to travel over 1200 miles with a menial budget?
It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.
We spent time praying, researching, inquiring and calling. No answers. I felt like I was a cinema detective, poring over papers with dark eyes and disheveled hair. Like I was following a Scavenger Hunt that was actually an elaborate prank. Like I was at staring at a blank Cryptogram.
I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved.
Fortunately, we found a hostel that met our tiny budget. Unfortunately, I slept on a bed embedded with cat hair, which exacerbated my allergies and, therefore, my cold. Depressed and weepy, I felt like a whiny toddler throwing a slobbery fit. The reason I felt that way was because that was precisely how I acted.
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds.
Enter Jesus in the flesh, aka Larisa, one of our squad leaders. She stayed with our team for longer than she was scheduled to in order to help us find unity and direction. And she did exactly that. She fostered discussions about role-defining, conducted meetings, provided organization, encouraged us, and conversed with us individually, all the while listening intently and operating in grace.
“Now dammit, look here, all of you, we all must admit that everything is fine and there’s no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we’re not REALLY worried about ANYTHING. Am I right?”
We stayed in an Airbnb for a couple days, where I got my own room and a heated blanket. God showed me his tender heart of comfort. We ate fresh food and spent the days in recovery and recuperation. Things were looking up.
“Here we go, we’re all together . . . What did we do in New York? Let’s forgive.” We had our spats back there. “That’s behind us, merely by miles and inclinations.”
To be continued…
