It was going to be a big year for me. 2020! A permanent move to Paris. There were two spiritual walks/pilgrimages along the Camino de Santiago (Frances and Ingles) I was going to lead. It was going to be a year of 1000+ miles as I was planning to walk sections of trails in Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Italy. A dear friend and I were going to explore a small, medieval Spanish village and dream of what a contemplative retreat could look like for English-speaking folks. It was the year I was going to take the biggest steps of faith I had ever experienced…hoping it would all lead to the development of a new ministry of spiritual formation called Ultreia.

Then Covid-19 slammed shut the door to the world. Instead of exploring the vast trails and cultures of Europe, I sheltered in my parents’ house for a few months, stayed in a friend’s second home in a small town in the plains of North Dakota, house sat for a friend in a trendy loft apartment in downtown Omaha, and finally found a temporary home of my own in the Omaha neighborhood of my childhood. It still was a year for steps of faith, but all behind the closed doors of border shutdowns and confinements of pandemic living

As that year ended, 2021 didn’t look more promising. There was little hope of moving to Paris and walking 1000+ miles around Europe. So I took a 6 month contract as a temporary pastor with a lovely church in Clarkson, NE and I worked on a spiritual formation project I had begun creating that past year. It was also a good time to get the ongoing pain in my hips figured out. After a season of physical therapy, x-rays and some MRIs, it turned out my “sciatica” was actually severe osteoarthritis. In both hips. At the age of 46. So the last six months of 2021 were dedicated to two total-hip replacement surgeries. Definitely not walking 1000+ miles that year. It felt like I had come to my own Land’s End. I had walked to my furthest point and I could walk no further.

So many questions and uncertainties ran through my mind as I was stuck behind those closed doors and at my own land’s end. But of course John O’Donohue had “the words” that helped soothe and settle my soul in that time of the great unknowing:

“This is the time to be slow,

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes.

Try as best as you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart 

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.”

The images, sentiment, hope and wisdom in John O’Donohue’s “Time To Be Slow” felt like a quilted blanket of comfort on me as I waited for “time (to) come good”.

So here we are now, in the heart of 2022. Doors are again opening. Despite the chaos of airline mismanagements around the world, people have once more returned to trotting around the globe. I’ve made it back to Paris, a day late as my plane from Omaha forgot to come to Eppley Airport to pick us all up. Annoyance at a day’s late arrival felt trivial to the closed border doors of 20/21. Once in Paris, a new door was opened to me; that of a sweet, tiny studio apartment in the 17th arrondissement that welcomes me home as I develop a balance of life between Europe and the U.S.

With these open doors comes new lands to explore. After the two successful and relatively easy hip replacement surgeries (Thanks Dr. Beran!!) I am preparing for some long distance walks. Next week, I will return to the Camino de Santiago and walk 190 miles from León to Santiago. 

I am eager to have this walking time. It’ll be a time of contemplation and gratitude. I want to reflect on my first camino walk in 2019, what these past few years have held for me, and to consider where this pilgrim’s life will go next. A lot of questions and I will probably have very few, if any, definitive answers by the end of the walk. But part of the good that came out of this pandemic for me was a deepened sense of patience and learning to be more than ok with the little I have. Perhaps the walk will take me deeper into my questions instead of resolving them. If so, so be it. I will give thanks for doors that didn’t stay closed and that I’m not stuck and isolated in my own land’s end. 

I’ve slightly altered the end of that blessing from O’Donohue to run through my mind as I walk these next few weeks, and I offer it to you as well:

May I find my feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air is once more kind

And blushed with beginning.