I love this crazy life of travel. I love staying in hostels, meeting people from every corner of the world. The dreads, the beards, the man buns; I love hostel hair. Hearing stories of where people are going and what they’ve seen and how they live. They are all the freest of souls, wandering the earth for the nomadic freedom of it all, and a little for each other. The chance meeting of two new friends on the front porch of a hostel that leads you into friends for a lifetime. We’re all out here searching for the best street food and asking for directions. When you carry so little with you, there is freedom indescribable. Lightness, grace to roam. All of what happens before you find your way home.
When your home becomes hostels and fields and lean two’s in all the little corners of the world there’s something that happens. There’s walls of your heart that wash away as you peer into the eyes of the Asian man sleeping on his corner of the platform. You just know what he sees as he peers off into the distance is so much simpler. You realized the world isn’t as dirty and scary as your Daddy told you it was as the beautiful Brazilian woman slides over and grabs your arm with a smile and asks you to lunch on a water taxi through Bangkok. You realize how God is in everything, every slow step, every downward smile, every laugh shared over the colliding of bodies on the same side of the sidewalk. He’s in the fields of Africa and the smog-filled streets of Central America. He’s in the mud huts and vast waterfalls and on Khaosan Road. Living out of a backpack is the safest thing I’ve ever done for my soul. It saved me from the mundane, from the rickety creaks of the same floor slats and the same Friday nights. You learn to stop being a tourist and follow the locals, and how at the moment you wander away from the lights of the Grand Palace and away from the karangs, you find the best pad thai of your ever-loving life. It’s romantic and novel. So here’s to the deviants. The brave souls who set out on this road and don’t turn back when things get hard. And as you fall in love with hearts and hair all over the world, remember that your story is not written by those who come into your lives – we have a much greater Author who knows who we are to walk along with – but it is made a little sweeter by it.
I found God in the seeking. To know Him is to love Him and to know so little else.
*video by my wonderful and talented teammate Brittany Obee of our 3rd Gen D Squad in Africa
