Whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving today or not, I hope you find a bit of time to say your own prayer of gratitude. For life’s many crazy blessings, for new cities to explore, for the gift of home, and of course, for pumpkin pie.
I will be leaving Turkey grateful for this unexpected lesson in navigation. We have to trust that the direction our compass is pointing in – whether what lies ahead is a less defined path, or perhaps there’s no path at all – is worth taking. It always is.
Having walked alone these last three weeks, another shadow moving next to mine made for quite a change. Yet again, the path had gone in a different direction from my expectations – the lesson then, I think, might lay in the space between.
And the final thing I realized, on a rainy Thursday afternoon in Turkey, is that the path knows exactly what we need and when. Warmth. Shelter. Direction. A guide. It’s up to us, then, to trust the path and its provision. The path, like life itself, is always right.
Every step of the way is the point – that much I hold onto, even as a perfectly round blister forms on the bottom of my right big toe. As for what will happen at the end? That, my friends, is still a mystery – and also part of the point, wouldn’t you say?
The shepherd walked with a grace I won’t soon forget, with a grace I hope to carry into all parts of my own path through life. The sight of him with his flock was worth walking three days to see, and will be worth walking another twenty for.
Travel is funny like that sometimes, isn’t it? Giving us these oddly scheduled arrivals and strange pockets of time in which to explore a new country; in-between places that will pass through us as quickly as we pass through them.
I’m overwhelmed by everything I will never understand about Stan’s story – what it means to lose a parent so soon in your life, what it means to hear enemy tanks encircling your city at night – and by the simple yet poignant wisdom he now shares with me.