So Far, So Good

So... we're finally away.

And not a minute too soon! The last three weeks have seemed like three months. "What would you do if you won the lottery?" I can tell you that after these three weeks, it would not involve giving up my job! I am thoroughly enjoying the time with my boys, and thoroughly enjoying a morning mainly structured around reading... but I can't shake this restlestness... and this quiet tinge of guilt that I'm not doing something.

So I'm glad to be on the road, again.

In the last week or so my reading has alternated between No Armor for the Back, a detailed recounting of the imprisonment and death of dozens of our early Baptist forebears, mostly 17th and 18th century English Baptist pastors and visionaries, and Into the Wild, the disturbing narrative of the last two years of the life of Chris McCandless, the Washington, DC native who, upon his graduation, with honors, from Emory University, abandoned his name, his family, and his future in the American dream, for a life of increasingly solitary... pilgrimage... which ended when he starved to death in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. I recoiled a bit when Jon Krakauer, the author, called McCandless's strange voyage a "pilgrimage." (We're counting for a better culmination to our summer!)

But this parallel reading, depressing as it has sometimes been, has suggested to me an element of pilgrimage that we've not yet acknowleged. This is, that when we are fully immersed in a passion, that immersion will necessarily move us -- and that movement may, of necessity, involve some element of... danger.

Mind you, we are taking a map with us, and Amy has made sure there will be plenty of food for the trip (McCandless did not), and we have no plans to speak out against the Queen when we pass by Buckingham Palace (as so many of our Baptist founders did)... so we hope to get nowhere near any prison, other than the Tower of London, and we have full plans to stay together, enjoy the company of relationships, old and new, and to harbor no alienating grudge against the world -- but I will admit that there is a little anxiety tucked uncomfortably away in our backpacks.

Two boys... three countries... 62-miles of unknown Spanish land to cross on foot... some of America's wildest whitewater to conquer... nearly 30 more miles in and our of the deepest ditch on the globe to brave, on foot and horseback...

We're trusting the challenge will do us good -- not kill us. All I can tell you is, so far, so good.

But we'll keep you posted!

r