I’m sitting at our kitchen table ruefully wishing it were colder so that our wood stove would be of slightly more use. The cabinets below the sink are lined with 10 liter bottles of water which we dutifully pump every day from the spring arising from the cellar of our dilapidated home. Our ‘bathroom’ is little more than an outhouse built around a 5 gallon bucket for which there’s a convenient hole in the back for easy access to remove it when it’s full of.. ahh, ‘rubbish’. And showers – what showers? No, for real, what showers?
At 9 a.m., the morning meanders quietly and slowly despite the fact the sun has been up since before 5 a.m (and won’t set until 9:30). Today it is quiet and I sit here pensively. The sledgehammer weight of reality that 10+ months have arrived and past announces its deafening presence in my solitude. I take a moment to sit back and daydream a little.
I imagine, if this were a movie, a slow zoom out of the camera from my pensive figure through the window. All the while, the music dims and the audio focal point becomes my solemn monologue. I reel clips in my mind of what I would say: life lessons I’ve learned, fond, once in a lifetime memories recalled, and regrets.. well, regretted but also influencing my course of life, maybe a humorous comment or two about the everydays of life. And when the camera view is so far away that the house becomes a dot surrounded by thousands of trees, I would wrap it up, nice and neat, with the conclusive pith and core of what just transpired on this journey so called the ‘World Race’.
That would be nice, wouldn’t it? The reality is the end of this pilgrimage isn’t the conclusion of a movie; it is just the end of a chapter, a pause in the storyline. I call it a pilgrimage because I came along to discover something, whatever it may have been, about the Lord and about myself. And the truth is that I came away with more questions than I did answers, more thoughts to delve into than conclusions to write down. We love the movies because loose ends are tied together in the end. That’s what I realized I desired out of this race around the world.
But there’s beauty in the unknowing; laughter amidst the mess; understanding in the questions. Whatever comes, whatever regrets may have surfaced, whatever mistakes I’ve made, there’s redemption in it all. Loose ends don’t need to be tied. Lessons don’t need to be finished. It’s a continual journey, an eternal walk, an infinite fascination with Jesus. He isn’t panning out the camera to bring things to a conclusion; He’s hovering over a blank page waiting to write the next adventure.
