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We are in Austin, Texas. I’m writing this close to midnight on Saturday night, and by the time it posts it will be the 15th of April. Two months down, two to go.

The kids are asleep. A cool breeze blows in through the bedroom window. Maile’s at the table at the front of the bus, writing. I’m in the back, in the dark, where I was stationed to sit until Sam fell asleep – now he’s on his side, wearing only a t-shirt and a diaper, sucking his thumb, taking easy, slow breaths.

Two months. Feels like two years. Or two decades.

We’ve stood in the midst of a slave graveyard, probing the ground for the missing headstones. I stared at the stars that night and wondered how such things could ever have been.

We got the bus stuck in a ditch. And then back out again.

We found out my aunt has breast cancer. And felt scared. And overwhelmed by her belief. And determined to stay positive with her.

We’ve stood with a crowd of people on the west coast of Florida on an ordinary night and watched the sun drop into the water. And everyone just stood there, their hands still shielding their eyes from a light that was no more, breathless at what they had just seen, frozen as still as if it was the last sunset.

We watched storm clouds roll into Memphis like tidal waves.

We viewed pictures on our friends’ Facebook profile of the memorial service for their not-yet-20-week-old baby. And I wept at the back of the bus.

We drove through Louisiana on bridges that go on for miles, bridges that overlook marshes and dilapidated houses. We walked the streets of New Orleans and saw pain and beauty. Hope and hopelessness.

We received a call from my mom that a friend’s two-year-old had drowned. Just like that, she was gone. And I think of my own children, and how every second I have with them is just grace.

We entered Texas and found it greener than expected, and more beautiful. A good friend took me to the VA hospital and I spoke with a vet while wearing a hospital gown over my clothes, and we fist-bumped before I left through our latex gloves.

And all along the way we’ve been blessed by family. Or old friends. Or internet friends we’d never met in real life before. Or complete strangers. Just blessing after blessing after blessing, unexpected, like pulling on your jeans and finding a $100 bill, but better because these blessings can’t be spent away.

So much death and life in two months. So many things lost and found. Thanks for traveling along with us.

*The picture is of the kids wading in the Guadalupe River north of San Antonio.

The VA hospital sat shrouded in silence, like a morgue for the living. Men in dire conditions sat quietly on scooters or in wheelchairs. They stared at Jack and I as we walked through the front door. I nodded hello to them. Some nodded back. Others did not. I felt very much out of place. For some reason, I felt very guilty.

“Oh, by the way, we’ll need to put on a gown and some gloves before we go in to see Ken,” said Jack, my friend and former Navy SEAL. “He’s got some open sores, nothing infectious, but we should cover up.”

I tried to hide my surprise. I thought we were just going in to say hi to a sick veteran, not don full Hazmat suits and enter an area where people’s limbs fell off. But it was too late for me to back out, so we stood there in the silent hallway, breaking open plastic bags. Pulling gowns over our heads. Squeaking our way into rubber gloves. I helped Jack slide a rubber glove on to his right hand – his left hand doesn’t work so well for things like that.

We walked up to the open doorway. Jack knocked on the metal frame – cling cling cling – then walked in. I hung back. The man in the hospital bed was not what I had expected.

Once upon a time, Ken had served two tours in Vietnam. Once upon a time, he had been a dog handler and a physical specimen. Once upon a time, he and Jack had done a four-hour swim during Jack’s recovery from being shot in the head. I would not have believed any of this, except that these once-upon-a-times hung on his wall in the form of photos. A small, square collage of a life long gone.

Now, just under 500 pounds, he sat in the bed. His chest hung down on to his stomach, which looked immobile. A heart condition had led to an incredible retention of water – left undiagnosed and untreated, his weight ballooned. A small blanket covered him from the waist down. A large mask covered his face and delivered necessary oxygen. Tubes slid past his nose.

I waited. I expected him to hate me, to stare at me with glowering eyes, wonder why someone would have the indecency to come and look at him, half naked, without permission. To see him at his worst, at his sickest, at his most vulnerable. After all, that’s what my response would have been in his situation: lock the door, stay away, don’t come near.

But immediately he smiled and took off the large mask. He sneezed maybe ten times while adjusting to the normal air. We punched knuckles.

“Hi there,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“This is Shawn, a friend of mine,” Jack said quietly.

“Hi Shawn. How do you know this guy?” he asked. And so started our conversation. And he was normal. He was human. He was kind. I asked him about Vietnam. I asked him about coming back from Vietnam. He was happy to have gone from 492 to 468 that month. He talked and talked about it all, talked as if he never wanted me to leave, talked as if he had been unable to speak his entire life and these were the first fresh words to leave his mouth.

Too soon, we left. He wanted me to come back the next day, or maybe the next week? I explained that we would be on the road, leaving for a new destination. I told him to keep working hard, to keep getting better. We punched knuckles again. I could tell he was disappointed.

Jack and I walked into the hallway. I didn’t see another visitor, not in the entire place, just man after man who had given his life for this piece of geography I call home. Shattered minds and bodies littered those quiet hallways, and besides the staff there was no one to help them gather up the pieces.

Jack and I got into the elevator and rode it down to the ground floor. We walked outside and crossed the street. The San Antonio sky felt wider, higher.

Behind us they prepared to lock the gates for the night.

Then it comes time to look first for respite, especially after long days on the road. We walk into these plastic palaces, their AC blasting, their primary colors tearing holes in my retinas. The cool air instantly chills my skin’s thin layer of sweat and grime.

We herd the children to the playground in the separate room and then collapse into a nearby booth. We breathe in the cool air, eat slowly, and somewhere off in the distance Cade has Sam in a headlock and both of them are screaming and people are wondering where these kids’ parents are but we don’t even flinch. We just sit. And breathe. And drink milkshakes.

* * * * *

Eight weeks ago we pulled away from my parents’ house in Paradise, PA. Eight weeks. Feels like years ago, decades. Millennia. Stars have been born, expanded, and collapsed into black holes during the time it has taken for us to drive from Pennsylvania to Florida to Tennessee to Louisiana to Texas.

But we’ve reached the halfway point now, and some days we’re in survival mode. We’ve settled into the long middle stretch, when you begin to question your sanity, your resilience, your ability to make it to the end. Ice cream, which in the beginning was an occasional treat, is now the answer to every problem.

* * * * *

The kids have taken their shoes off in the playground and are throwing them at strangers. I tap on the glass, like a child at a zoo trying to scare the animals. While I want to minimalize their savage-like behavior, I also want them to burn off as much energy as possible. I give them a stern look and point a menacing finger towards the shoe rack. Their shoulders slump, as if I have told them they are forbidden from having fun for the rest of their lives. They reluctantly return the weapons to the rack.

I slouch back in the booth. On second thought, I go get a refill of sweet iced tea.

* * * * *

“It’s 8:30,” I say to Maile. “We should go back to the bus.”

“Do we have to?” she asks, sighing, taking another spoonful of milkshake.

“Five more minutes,” I say. She groans. She is worse than the kids.

* * * * *

Now it’s 10:07 pm. My computer says 11:07 because I never changed it from Eastern Time. The inside of our bus is mostly dark, except for the small beams that escape Cade’s bunk where he reads long into the night, long after everyone else has fallen asleep. Lucy is in the top bunk, her fan humming. Abra and Sammy sleep. Finally.

And no matter how I vowed that I would go to bed early, I simply cannot trade these quiet hours for anything. Especially not sleep. So I turn on some music. Maile falls asleep beside me in the bed. I write a little. I play Words With Friends. I check Facebook. I write some more.

Then, when I can barely keep my eyelids separated, I put away the computer and read books on my iPhone until I drift off and nearly drop the phone on my face. Then I turn it all off. I give in. Every possible minute has been squeezed out of this day.

I fall asleep, and I dream of wide open spaces.

* * * * *

Please head over to Kathy’s blog (Katdish) for a great review of my book, “Building a Life Out of Words.” I’ll admit I was a little nervous about this one because I knew she wouldn’t pull any punches.

We walked up Tchoupitoulas Street towards the French Quarter in New Orleans. The sky? Blue cotton candy. The breeze? A cool sheet. The streets? Alive and beautiful and carefree.

We walked up Tchoupitoulas Street towards the French Quarter on that day between Good Friday and Easter and I noticed a man sitting with his back against a vacant building. Crumbling, hollow, condemned: both the man and the building. They seemed to hold each other up. They seemed to weigh each other down.

He nodded at me, right there on Tchoupitoulas Street, his politely parted lips revealing an inexplicable assortment of gold, silver, plaque, and empty spaces. For some reason the richness of his brown skin immediately made me wonder if he was a grandfather. My youngest daughter, if she would have sat on his lap, would have loved his skin. She would have pulled on it and pinched it and asked him why it was so brown, why it was so freckled. She would have asked him why his teeth were gold, or where the missing ones had gone.

But what did he see when he looked at me? Just another person walking by? A young man blessed with money and a nice family?

A rich young ruler?

I stopped, and New Orleans was quiet. My wife looked back over her shoulder. My four children stared at the man, wondered about him, wondered why I stopped. I never used to give money to people without homes, people without jobs, people without hope. “They’ll only use it for drugs or alcohol,” everyone used to tell me. Then I read something by CS Lewis:

Another things that annoys me is when people say, ‘Why did you give that man money? He’ll probably go and drink it.’ My reply is, ‘But if I kept it, I should have probably drunk it.’

I reached into my pocket. A quarter. That’s all I had. Twenty-five cents.

“I’m sorry, man,” I said, plucking the quarter from my pocket and reaching towards him. “This is all I’ve got. I wish I had more.”

You would have thought I had given him a $100 bill.

“Bless you, brother,” he said through a smile verging on tears in a Louie Armstrong voice.

“Bless you, man,” I said, turning away, feeling a new weight of sadness, as if I carried that building away with me, on my own back.

* * * * *

We spent $40 at a place called Mother’s on an amazing lunch. Jambalaya. Red beans and rice. Shrimp. French Fries. Grits with melted butter. And for the kids, pancakes with butter and syrup. We usually have leftover food when we eat, but it was a late lunch, and we were hungry, and we ate every last bite. And we drank every glass of water at the table.

And it felt so good, being full, and strong, and breathing in the city.

* * * * *

We walked down Decatur Street in the late afternoon, leaving the French Quarter behind with its beauty and its voodoo and its narrow alleyways. The sun? Glaring and hot. The river? Brown and slow. The clouds? Huge and harmless.

We walked down Decatur Street then turned on to Port of New Orleans Place, a broad sidewalk that flows beside the river. Huge empty stages waited for open air concerts to inhabit them. Docks waited for boats to possess them.

Sitting on a bench was a small woman holding a baby. She held a cardboard sign that read, “My baby and me are homeless.”

Probably just a heist to make some money, I thought to myself.

We walked past and I held my breath the way I always do when I walk past someone like that, waiting for lightning to strike me. Then another thought.

What the hell is wrong with me?

By then I had six bucks in cash, so I turned around. Again. Always turning. Always stopping. When I walked toward her, her eyes opened wide, as if I was going to beat her for sitting there. Then, when she saw the bills, she jumped – it literally scared her – as if that was even more startling than the fact that I looked at her.

“Thank you, thank you,” she just kept saying over and over again. “Thank you, thank you.” And I had no reply. Not to her. Not to her child. So I turned my back on her thanks and walked away, shaken.

* * * * *

Along the river there are those huge binoculars that sit on small pedestals, the ones you have to pay 25 cents to use. The ones through which you can’t really see anything.

“Daddy, daddy, we want to look into those things!” my children cried out, their sandals slapping on the concrete as they ran and pushed and vaulted a small wall to get to the magic.

“Awww,” Cade complained. “It costs money. It costs 25 cents.”

I reached into my pocket, then I remembered where my last quarter had gone.

Oh, the joy that accompanies empty pockets.

* * * * *

The winners of Mark Hughes’ book, Sons of Grace, were Michelle Woodman, Donna Tallman, Andrea Ward, Ken Stewart, and Anne Bogel. Please email your mailing address to shawnsmucker@yahoo.com.

I sat at the back of the bus on Friday, Good Friday, and my eyes swam in tears as I soaked up the photos of a memorial service for my dear friends’ baby: a willow tree, pink balloons scattered in a blue sky, and a small white box that fit comfortably in one hand.

I think of other friends who will soon accept delivery of a one-week-old baby boy, given up for adoption by his mother, now claimed by his father. The adoptive parents couldn’t bear to live with the little boy until they knew whether or not they could keep him, so he will spend this limbo-time with my friends. They will love him and feed him and stay up nights with him until the system decides where to place him: with his biological father, or with the parents aching to adopt him. Then my friends will say good-bye.

One of the most beautiful people I know waits to find out about a certain unexpected spot noticed on a PET scan. Monumental shades, those whites and grays and blacks.

We spend so much time waiting in this world. And there is so much death.

* * * * *

In my mind, that is what this weekend is about. When those who follow Christ break their world view down into its four most fundamental elements, this is what remains: Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Redemption. Three of those find their most powerful roots in this weekend. A weekend of death, a weekend of resurrection, and a weekend of redemption

They are monumental, really, these concepts. Life changing. Because who among us has not experienced death? Who among us has never felt that shattering of lost hope? That crumbling of great expectations? That sudden split, like a cracking tooth, when we realize that what we had hoped for will never be realized?

* * * * *

I read a story once about a man who moved to a South American country because he had seen pictures of children living among these tall, vaulted piles of stone coffins. The orphans would walk far into this land of death and find old tombs that had broken open, and they would make their home inside of them. This graveyard was one of the few safe places for them in the city, because most of those who wanted to take advantage of the orphans were superstitious and would not follow them in to where they lived amongst the ghosts.

When the man arrived in this South American city, he found things exactly as he had heard. The children had created their own city in amongst the graves. Living beside the dead.

* * * * *

There is so much waiting in this world. And so much death.

But don’t become too accustomed to foraging among the graves. Don’t become numb to the smell that wafts out from the cracked tombs.

Death happens in this life. Dreams shatter. Relationships dissipate. And sometimes it becomes almost comfortable to remain in that broken place, because there is a kind of safety in deciding not to hope again.

Yet there is a resurrection waiting to take place in you. A redemption.

A grave is no place to live.

This guest post comes to you via Mark Hughes, author of Buzz Marketing and Sons of Grace. I had the privilege of hearing him speak at the Killer Tribes conference in Nashville last weekend – his message was both practical and inspirational. If you’d like to win a free copy of Sons of Grace, leave a comment below.

Walk into any bar, barbershop or salon and you’re guaranteed to get an earful of opinions. How many times have you heard discussions beginning with “What we ought to do is…” and how often does this talk lead anywhere?

Whether you’re leading a Fortune 500 company or work for the Post Office, you probably envision the future being different–and better than the present.

I have a friend who was an enforcer in a motorcycle gang now doing a 50 year term for murder, but we’ll get to that later.

Right now there’s a line in a movie that may capture sentiment in your life:  “I’ve finally embraced the life I never wanted.”

You didn’t intend your life to be like this.  You wanted a more compassionate spouse.  You wanted a son that didn’t die in an accident.  You wanted a sibling not affected by drugs.  You wanted a child without a disability.  I know.  I understand.

But every beginning has an ending, and every ending has a new beginning.  It can happen every day.  Tomorrow is a new beginning, and rather than rejecting the life you never wanted, we need to act like professional athletes.  We need to have the courage to play this game of life hurt—getting on the field, and playing through the pain.  Winston Churchill said, “If you’re walking through Hell, keep walking.”

My friend Ron Gruber (“The Motorcycle Gang Member” in the book Sons of Grace) had to develop this quality at an early age. Raised with a sadistically abusive father, courage was something he needed simply to make it from one day to the next:

“You see, I had to learn right out of the gate that a coward will always stop short of crossing the line, allowing himself to think, ‘Don’t do it…you might get hurt.’  For any normal person, this would be called a healthy survival instinct.  But beginning at seven, I had to learn that a winner forces himself beyond any common-sense fear to emerge victorious.  To find the courage I needed to survive, I was forced to abandon normal understanding of good and evil and race into an unfeeling zone that the average man on the street knows nothing about and, hopefully, never will.  That zone would become the major influence in the choices I made in life; both bad and, in the end, good.”

Courage isn’t the same as good judgment.  Ron’s overdeveloped sense of courage that enabled him to win respect from the wrong kinds of people, often by committing atrocious deeds eventually landing him in prison for murder.

Ron’s story seems to blow everyone away—you can read it for free here.  It teaches us some important lessons about courage:

1.    Courage is a decision. Ron brings this into focus when he talks about “crossing the line.” I like to think about this line being the border between thought and action, between what you know and what you do. If you’ve ever jumped into a cold lake then you know exactly what I mean – right before every courageous act is a moment where you understand that this move may have consequences beyond your ability to understand, and that there’s no turning back after the fact. Then you go ahead and do it.

2.    Courage means making yourself vulnerable. There’s an old adage that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the ability to persevere in the face of fear. Whatever it is that you are afraid of – public humiliation, taking a financial loss, or even death – you can’t properly exercise courage unless you expose yourself to it. After all, if you aren’t taking yourself out of your safety zone, then there really isn’t anything brave about what you are doing. But when you do make yourself vulnerable a curious thing happens: you don’t lose fear, but the fear loses its power over you. You gain power, in a sense, by renouncing control.

3.    Courage is a rare trait. There is a reason why we’re naturally drawn to leaders who display courage. It’s not easy! It is counterintuitive, and often requires us to go against the gravitational forces of everything we know.  But everyone will face situations in life that will require responding with true courage. Whether and how you choose to respond when this moment comes for you will depend on your ability to recognize courage not only where it’s already present, but where it is needed.

Have you embraced the life you never wanted—coupled with the fear that comes with it…and the courage that overcomes it?