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Recently a friend of mine woke up at 4am after hearing a loud noise in the downstairs of his farmhouse. He drifted out of bed in a fog – it was a hot summer night – and mumbled middle-of-the-night admonishments at his dog who he figured must have busted through the mudroom screen.

He wandered the dark ground floor of the expansive farmhouse wearing only his boxers. He went into the mudroom: no dog. He peeked in each of the pitch black rooms: no dog. He sleepily walked into the kitchen, his bare feet scuffing on the linoleum.

His wife had woken up at the sound of the bang. She thought of their baby, only a few days old. She thought of their four other children sleeping in various rooms of the house. She heard her husband’s footsteps creaking over the old floorboards. Then she heard him say something she couldn’t quite believe, something that indicated her worst fear was taking place that night.

“What are you doing in our house?” he asked.

The firmness of his voice crashed through the night.

* * * * *

What are your worst case scenarios? Do you have nagging fears that reside somewhere in the back of your mind, the kind that when given an ounce of nourishment come roaring into your frontal lobe?

I had a lot of worst case scenarios dashing around in my mind when we left on our four-month trip:

As soon as I began driving the 40-foot bus, I worried about getting it stuck somewhere.

As soon as I started driving through the mountains and saw the emergency truck ramps, I worried about losing our brakes.

As soon as we got about halfway through the trip, I wondered what would happen if I didn’t land another big project before we got back.

Yeah, you probably already know this, but all those things happened. It was almost like God shook his head sadly and said, You know, if you’re going to be so captivated by the fear of these things that might happen, I might as well walk you through them. That way, you’ll see that you can survive it. And then you can get on with life. This is my gift to you.

I don’t know if that’s how it works or not. I don’t know if that’s how God thinks. But there is a peace that comes in the midst of worst-case scenarios that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. There’s an incredibly tangible sense of presence. The soap bubble bursts, and while I realize that yes, this worst-case scenario stuff sucks, I’ve had another, even more startling realization.

I can get through it.

* * * * *

My friend found a man covered in blood in his kitchen. He talked to the man in a calm, firm voice.

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Can I call to get you some help?” The man didn’t want help.

“You need to get out of my house.”

After a few minutes, the man (his system saturated with drugs) walked out of the house and down the lane. He was later apprehended by the police – they had been looking for him.

Meanwhile, in the upstairs bedroom, my friend’s wife felt something strange in the midst of her worst-case scenario: peace. When her husband came back up to bed, their first thoughts weren’t about fortifying their house or moving somewhere else – their first thoughts were prayers for the man who was so lost that he would wander barefoot through the woods and on to their middle-of-nowhere property. So lost.

And this, I think, is the beautiful thing about trusting: it prepares a path of peace inside of us, a path that we are often unaware of until the worst-case scenario comes ripping through the undergrowth, tearing at the branches, stripping off the bark.

Then, there it is.

A new path.

What is the point of silence?

I sit beside my grandmother and I have to lean in close just to hear her speak. A small, weak voice musters strength somewhere inside of her and comes out in a whisper, slow and through water. I am so close that her wiry gray hair tickles my nose and I can smell her vanilla hand cream.

We exchange simple communication, yes or no questions that require only nods or shakes of the head. I force out a deep, heavy voice, very much unlike me. She calls me Kyle, my cousin, and I smile because I know how much she loves him, and I am happy to be lumped into that drawer of memory.

Then we sit surrounded by the heaviness of silence. For perhaps the first time I understand how silence is not a lack of sound, but the presence of stillness, peace, and a tangible sort of waiting.

Her eyelids grow heavy. Beside her, numerous plates of uneaten food. The second hand ticks along, oblivious to all of us.

* * * * *

“I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” Chaim Potok

* * * * *

I wonder about the nature of silence, of stillness. I wonder about finding it in a world that places such high value on shouting and noise and being heard.

There are, after all, things that I lose when I enter into silence: the ability to defend or explain myself. To petition verbally on behalf of myself or others. To control the amount and timing of attention that I receive.

But is that all that silence has to offer? Loss? Disadvantage? A lack of control?

* * * * *

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Eliot

* * * * *

Maybe if we only value the temporal, the material, then silence is worthless. Maybe if we only find truth in the things that we can see and touch and hear, then silence is a waste of time, a lost opportunity.

But because there is more than what I can see or hear, deliberate silence opens me up to new ways of thinking.

During one windy morning in Tulsa, I walked outside of the bus and sat in the grass waiting for the fresh water tank to fill. I have as clear a memory of that silence as I do of anything else on the trip, because in that stillness I found encouragement and hope and peace.

* * * * *

“In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.”  Mother Teresa

* * * * *

What is it about silence?

Due to intense pressure by one Jennifer Luitwieler, here are my top ten favorite novels. This list is always subject to change, depending on the day or the mood I’m in (all except the top three, which are always the first three books I mention as my favorites no matter the day or mood):

10) Gilead Marilynne Robinson

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”

9) David Copperfield Charles Dickens

“My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.”

8) All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy

“She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he’d not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.”

7) Catcher in the Rye J D Salinger

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

6) Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

5) Blindness Jose Saramago

“I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.”

4) Angle of Repose Wallace Stegner

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”

3) The Brothers K David James Duncan

“–I truly and deeply wanted to kill him. And I believe I could have done it, with nothing but my hands. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Peter had an arm around me. “Let it go, Kade,” he was whispering very gently, though his arm was nearly crushing me. “Open your fists,” he said, “and let go of the coals.”

2) East of Eden John Steinbeck

“There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.”

1) A Prayer For Owen Meany John Irving

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever — there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”

* * * * *

I’m still trying to decide what to make of the scarcity of women author’s on my list. Am I a male chauvinist? Is it that, relatively speaking, many fewer women than men were published during the years when most of my favorite books were written (due to lack of privilege, not lack of talent)? As a man am I drawn more to the way men tell stories? I encountered most of these books in high school or college – was I simply presented with an overwhelming number of books written by men? I don’t know. It has me thinking.

Have you read any of these? What’s your favorite novel of all time? Your top three? Top ten?

The entire weekend after I turned down the job, I wandered the house like a kid fresh off the tilt-a-whirl: I didn’t know which way was up or which way was down. The job had been a chance to return to the “normal” world, where paychecks (however small) showed up as direct deposits and my family would have good health insurance. I wondered if perhaps I had just made a terrible mistake by not accepting the offer.

Worse yet, God was silent on the issue. I couldn’t get a clear sense of the rightness or wrongness of my decision. I wondered if my determination to continue writing for a living had finally meandered into the realm of the irresponsible. There are a lot of people out there who aren’t doing what they love to do, I reasoned with myself. What makes me so special?

* * * * *

In the midst of this, the weight of sadness.

On Friday evening I got one of those texts you never want to get. It was from a good friend of mine:

Hey, man. Just got back from the midwives and they couldn’t find the heartbeat. Please be praying for us.

The next day they went in and his wife delivered their second stillborn child at 20-weeks.

The same night that she was in the hospital giving labor to a child already gone, my wife got a text from another friend. She had delivered a beautiful baby girl that night and couldn’t be happier. This is when the weight descends, a cloud of questions and sadness. I find myself wondering about the role of chance in things such as this. I wonder how to respond when my friends’ lives are racing down the mountain with no emergency truck ramp in sight.

* * * * *

I remember traveling down a mountainside in the Bighorn National Park. It was five days after we lost our brakes in the Teton Pass, and I felt sick to my stomach with a foreboding that our brakes would once again fail us. A Jesus Culture song started playing on the bus, and at one point these lyrics sang out to me:

and your spirit soars in me
to the highest height
from where I’ll not look back, no
I’ll keep trusting you

I’ll keep trusting God.

Really? Did I really trust God? With my family, who had been in terrible danger until an emergency truck ramp came into view? Did I trust God with my finances, which seemed to also be on a 10% grade with no such ramp in sight? Did I trust God with my life?

I wasn’t sure, but I remember singing that song as we swept down the hill, wanting it to be true.

* * * * *

Early during the week after I turned down the job, I got a note in the mail. It was a small card. I opened it and read some very kind words. Inside was a check for $1000.

The next day, while talking to a another good friend, she smiled and with tears in her eyes handed me a slip of paper. It was a check for $500.

In the space of 24 hours I had been handed the same amount of money I would have made in four weeks at the job I turned down. Sometimes it is good to wait, to not make decisions based out of fear or a sense of panic.

* * * * *

I don’t know how to explain it when the emergency truck ramps don’t show up. When the checks don’t appear in the mail out of thin air. When the diagnosis doesn’t line up with our prayers. When the business idea, once so full of hope and promise, leads to financial ruin. When the child dies.

I don’t know.

But I wonder. I wonder if maybe emergency truck ramps sometimes look a little different than what we expect. Perhaps emergency truck ramps sometimes come in the form of a friend’s shoulder to cry on, strong backs to bear at least a small part of our grief. Or a parent’s basement to live in. Maybe what feels like the worst case scenario, like losing a job, is itself the emergency truck ramp.

And death – even death! Could it be that death is the last great emergency truck ramp, leading us safely away from this life and into a place of peace and stillness?

So many questions. But I know this: no matter where I find myself – chugging slowly uphill, resting at the summit, careening down the mountain, or stopped in the heavy stones of an emergency truck ramp – there’s no point in looking back. No point in living with regrets or wishing for a different road.

Anything that might be good about this life is out there in front of us somewhere. We just have to be strong enough to keep moving.

and your spirit soars in me
to the highest height
from where I’ll not look back, no
I’ll keep trusting you

I mostly remember Gordie before his ALS diagnosis as a tall man with a very gentle spirit. Whenever I saw him, he shook my hand (in that large bear paw of his), crossed his arms, sort of leaned back a little, and acted like I was the most important person in the world. He has always been a good listener.

Before his life with ALS he loved to play the guitar, and we watched as he went from standing up, to playing on a stool, to strumming while sitting in a chair. It was a sad day indeed when his fingers could no longer work a pick.

But if there’s one thing I can say about Gordie: in the six years that he has had ALS, his physical stature may have become smaller, but the man has become a spiritual giant in my eyes. I know he has had his share of depression and weariness. I’m sure there are days when he wants to give up. But he doesn’t, he keeps going. And I think we can all use that kind of inspiration from time to time: someone who forges ahead, believes, and fights, even in the midst of overwhelming odds.

Here is a video of the speech he gave at a recent fundraising event. He can no longer speak, so he used a computer program to deliver his words to the crowd. Please take a moment and listen to a very wise, very strong man.

“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.” David Grayson

I was nervous. A reporter from the local news fidgeted with my mic then attached it to my shirt. I sat down under the glare of those huge lights that look like silver umbrellas. The cameraman watched us through his lens, then turned to the news anchor.

“We’re good,” he said.

For the next ten minutes or so we talked about the four-month trip my family had been on: life on the bus, life on the road, the places we’d seen. I thought we were finished.

“One more question,” he said. “Did you change on this trip?”

Did I change on this trip?

For the first time during the interview I was speechless. My glance slid off to the side. I kind of held my breath.

How did I change on this trip?

* * * * *

You can’t go on a 10,000 mile trip without changing. You can’t visit thirty-some states, or see Native Americans living in poverty, or see joy light up someone’s face when you give them a quarter without feeling something crucial slide inside of you, like the shifting of continents. You can’t get a 40-foot bus stuck in a ditch, or arrive at Yellowstone late at night only to discover you have no power, or lose your brakes at 8400 hundred feet while crossing the Teton Pass, without changing.

I knew I had changed. But how?

I stared at the news anchor, took a deep breath, and I stumbled through my answer. But the truth was, I couldn’t identify it. I knew I had changed: I felt differently, I thought differently, I looked at the world differently. Yet beyond those huge generalities, I couldn’t verbalize the specifics.

* * * * *

For the last week I’ve thought back over that question, and I’m still struggling to articulate the answer. How have I changed?

I’m less inclined to give in to the pressure to live a life resembling everyone else’s.

I’m less concerned about the future than I have been for a long time (most days).

I’m more open to embarking on mini-adventures during a typical day – I used to feel rather glued to the comfort of my desk chair or, in the evening, the safety of the living room.

Still, I search myself for further evidence of change. I wonder if the space given by more time will help me see more clearly.

How have your adventures in life changed you?

* * * * *

This post is part of a blog carnival about travel stories over at Prodigal Magazine. Check out the other contributors HERE.