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I remember climbing up on to the roof of Grandma’s house back in the mid-80s. I was eight or nine years old (the age of my oldest son now), and my teenage cousins reached down over the edge of the sandpaper-like asphalt shingles and pulled me up, scraping the skin off my stomach. I remember the giddy feeling of being so high, of looking down on the corn that usually looked down on me.

There was something raw and wild about being on a roof, and as the sun set we lay there on the shallow slope, our hands behind our heads, our feet braced to keep us from sliding off. Then, when all was dark, the fireworks launched into the night sky, their explosions thudding against my small rib cage like a defibrillator.

I was too young to wonder how my Grandma was feeling during those years after my Grandfather had died. Almost thirty years ago. I wonder if she cried herself to sleep, missing him, or lay awake at night worrying about how she would pay the mortgage. I wonder if she heard those fireworks exploding and wished he was back for one last Fourth of July, sitting out on their small deck, smelling the cut hay and watching the fireflies.

* * * * *

My Grandma, my father’s mother, has always loved us with a tough and indefatigable love. Her kisses are direct and non-negotiable, always followed by a few firm slaps on the cheek or a vice-grip pinch on that fatty area under your chin. She has been sort of bony for most of the years that I remember her, but not frail. Anything but frail.

Ironic then that this tough love has always been accompanied by a soft voice, kind eyes, and a clearly communicated message: your presence means the world to her. Her love, after one of those signature greetings, came in the form of iced tea or a hot dinner. When I walked into her house (or, in recent years, her room), her reaction was always the same.

“Well!” she said, as if you were presenting her, not with just your presence, but with a check for $1 million. “Shawn, Shawn, Shawn. Look who it is. How are you? How are you?” Her voice came out in a sing-song kind of cadence, perhaps from all of those years of singing in church or with her children.

* * * * *

The text I got from my parents last night was a wake up call. When they walked into her room, there was no overwhelming welcome. She sat, and when she spoke it was with a quiet, weak voice. But she is 92, and her body has endured much, and her mind struggles to make all of the connections.

When I heard that, I knew it was time to head home.

To be sure, she has pushed on through overwhelming odds before: heart surgery, multiple strokes, a recent bout of pneumonia. But she is 92, and she seems to be fading, and I want to be home with her and with my family. So we’re cutting our trip short by a week or so and heading home this Friday night: a 12-hour drive, and we should get home by Saturday night.

111 days down. Three to go. I hope we make it in time.

I am not very good at waiting.

When I was a kid, I ran everywhere. I ran out to get the mail and ran to answer the door and tried to run while pushing the lawn mower around the yard so I could finish and move on to the next thing. I ran to our neighbors if I had time to play and I tried to run down the halls in middle school. If mom or dad asked me to get something outside, I ran.

I so badly wanted to be THERE. Not HERE.

You know where I mean. That place out there. That place where I’m making more money than I am now. That place where I have a little bit of a nicer house than I do now. That place where I’m finally married or I finally have more kids or the kids have finally moved out.That place where all of my current problems are sorted out.

* * * * *

We’re prodded into this mindset by the atmosphere of our age. Every retailer can help you figure out a way to get what you want NOW instead of waiting until you can afford it. We can view Super Bowl commercials before they even air on television, and we read spoilers of our favorite shows before they take place. We buy things now and pay for them later. Young kids want to be teenagers, teenagers want to be adults, and adults want to be retired.

* * * * *

Yesterday I wrote about how this trip is helping me live more in the here and now. And it is. But all it takes is one bit of bad news, one unexpected disappointment, and suddenly the here and now isn’t good enough anymore. HERE isn’t good enough. I want to be THERE.

* * * * *

The word “wait” shows up in the New Living Translation of the Bible 79 times. That’s a lot of waiting. In one of those instances, Moses tells his people, “Stay here and wait for us until we come back to you.” But the Israelites simply couldn’t wait for Moses to return; they started feeling abandoned, so they created a god all their own. A lump of gold. And they worshiped it and they bowed down to it and they couldn’t get enough of it.

I read that story and I think to myself, How completely ridiculous – those Israelites sure had issues! And then I get to the place where I am tired of waiting and feel abandoned and I create my own little gods. When God doesn’t show up in my timing, I rush to put my hope in people or business plans or my own ingenuity, and soon I am clutching on to that thing like a golden calf, and I’m caressing it and maybe even calling it “My precious.”

That’s a little weird. But it’s what I do.

“Be still in the presence of the LORD, and wait patiently for him to act.” Psalm 37:7

Where should I wait? In his presence. To me, that’s a meditative place, a deliberate place, a place where I can hear my own breathing. And what should I do in that space?

Be still.

Wait patiently.

Stop running.

“Well, here we are,” I say as we pull the big blue bus into yet another Walmart parking lot, this one just outside of Urbana, Illinois. “Home sweet home.”

Maile smiles.

“I’m going to miss spending the night in Walmart parking lots,” she says.

As silly as that may sound, I know exactly what she means. There’s something nice about pulling into a mostly vacant parking lot, finding an out-of-the-way spot for the bus, turning on the generator, and falling asleep to the sound of its humming while a cool breeze whistles in through the screened window at the back of the bus. There’s something nice about the knowledge that the next day you’ll be on the road again, to a new destination a few hundred miles away, and that, once again, you’ll see things and places and people you’ve never seen before.

* * * * *

A kind of reflective peace has descended during these last few weeks of our trip. It’s as if our emotions have decided to mirror the landscape, going from mountainous, rugged and ever-changing to smooth and even. It feels kind of like one long sigh.

Now that home is in our sights, I find myself thinking back over the trip, marveling at the experience, hesitantly lifting rocks of thought and waiting to see what has grown there during the last three and half months, waiting to see what might scurry out. Perhaps a new take on my current life. A new direction. A new hope.

But even more often I find myself looking forward. What waits for us when we get back to Lancaster? What sort of work will I be able to find? Does my novel have a future? Will we write a book about our trip? Will I be able to survive the summer eating only sweet corn?

* * * * *

So many questions. I’m still working through a lot of things in my mind. Somehow, though, this adventure has (nearly) cured me of my need for answers. My need to know where the next project will come from or how I’ll make any money. My need to know if God will supply another runaway truck ramp just in time.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I am okay living in the here and now. Let me tell you: it’s a glorious feeling.

 

A few weeks ago, I opened it up for questions about our trip. “Ask me anything!” I proclaimed. Here’s the final half of the questions you asked, along with my answers:

1. Leave it to Leanne to ask eight questions. Seriously:

How much planning went into this? A lot, and not much. By that I mean, we planned out the cities ahead of time, but only reserved campgrounds or places to stay a few weeks ahead (at the most).

Did you budget everything, including fuel? We tried to budget, but grossly underestimated the amount of fuel required. Which is why we’re kind of limping home at this point (and why you might see the kids pushing the bus down the PA turnpike).

What would you do differently if you were starting out again? Go for six months instead of four. Make fewer stops and stay longer in each place. Do a better job budgeting fuel.

Do you have a semblance of a schedule? No. I mean, sometimes, I guess…No. No schedule. Which is very difficult for me.

How does homeschooling the kids work? We’re focusing on the basics (Math and Writing) and incorporating lesson plans on each state as we go. Maile has been homeschooling for a few years now, so it’s old hat. We also bought a pass that includes a lot of Children’s Museums, and we’ve hit a LOT of those.

Was the pace you set manageable or was it too much driving? Pace was a little much at times. I think for our next trip we’ll do fewer destinations and spend more time at each.

How did the kids occupy themselves during all the driving? Our kids did awesome. They mostly played with Legos, dolls and cars, wrote in their journals, read books, and watched movies. Oh, and got annoying about always being hungry. And didn’t like to go #2 in the bus’s toilet. When we parked up they took their toys outside.

When are you all coming to Canada? That’s on our next trip’s itinerary. We’re thinking about hitting the middle of the US, then heading up to Alaska.

2. How is Maile’s driving going? (Ashley)

Mai is a great driver. During her first stint, I was back getting the kids drinks and food and finding things for them to do. After thirty minutes I came up and sat in the passenger’s seat. “Sheesh!” I said. “This is demanding.” She looked at me with a smile. “Why do you think I’m so eager to drive?”

3. Wifi or tether? (Doug)

Tether, I think. We have a roaming hotspot that gives us Wifi through Verizon. Is that tether?

4. How are the kids keeping themselves occupied during the driving parts?

I think I answered this in one of Leanne’s plethora of questions, but I’ll also throw in coloring books and whining.

5. What were the weirdest things you saw in the following categories: plant life, insect, sign, establishment name, and food?

Good question. The palm trees in Pasadena always kind of freak me out because their roots look like something out of an alien movie. I don’t remember seeing any weird insects, although the moths in Amarillo were freakishly numerous. Weirdest sign? Nothing specific comes to mind, although Yellowstone doesn’t seem to have ANY signs. I guess the peanut sauce the Luitwielers made for us was weird, but only because of how good it tasted.

6. Is California awesome or what? (Jon)

Yes. Beyond awesome. Not at all what I had expected. The coast was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

7. What I’d like to know is were it only you and Maile on this trip would you have approached it differently and if so how?

One thing we will do someday when we take this trip, just the two of us, is do more of the difficult stuff, like hiking down into the Grand Canyon or going on some of the tougher trails in the Redwood forest. Our younger two are still a bit young for that. I think we will get off the beaten track a little more. We would also take a much smaller vehicle and plan ahead less.

8. What is that a picture of?

Yes, it is a picture of the Tetons. We lost the brakes in the bus going over those mountains.

We will be home in two weeks! I can’t believe it. Stay tuned as we talk more about what our life is going to look like when we get back and some details regarding a few exciting new projects I’m working on.

Finally, if you have a few extra minutes:

– Like my Facebook page
– Purchase or review my E-book, “Building a Life Out of Words”
– Go eat some ice cream.

I want to be a successful writer, whatever that means. I want to be read by at least a moderate amount of people. I would like to make a decent living by arranging words on a page – strange, if you think about it, this way of conveying ideas and stories, and perhaps even stranger, this desire to profit by it.

But most days I don’t want to pay the piper. I resist the years of practice it takes to get there. Years of Ramen Noodles and driving a vehicle without hubcaps and paying tolls with change I find under the mat.

* * * * *

In 1959, Madeleine L’Engle had the idea to write A Wrinkle in Time while on a cross-country trip with her husband and children. They were in a time of transition, and she was finding herself. Or attempting to. This sounds oddly familiar.

The book “poured from (her) fingers” when they got back from the trip. She fell in love with it. Her children loved it. Her agent loved it. She wrote that she had hoped that its publication “would end a decade during which I had received countless rejection slips for more traditional books.”

But A Wrinkle in Time went unnoticed. For two years, she received rejection after rejection. She began to doubt herself. When she finally found a publisher, they took her book on reluctantly, as a personal favor and a pet project.

“Now, dear, we don’t want you to be disappointed,” her new publisher said, “but this book is not going to sell. It’s much too difficult for children. We’re publishing it as a self-indulgence because we love it, and we don’t want you to be hurt.”

* * * * *

I always want to be at the mountain top, but often I shy away from the path that leads there.

* * * * *

We’re driving out of Chicago through a drifting rain, under skies the color of wet cement. But to the west of us, a thin red band outlines the edge of the world.

“It’s funny,” Maile says from the driver’s seat. “I’ve seen a lot of sunsets, but I’ve never thought about what was out there.”

She’s right, as usual – there is a strangeness to knowing firsthand the landscapes along the way from here to the sunset: the flat plains of Iowa and South Dakota, the bison-covered slopes of Yellowstone, the forbidding Teton Pass, the wilderness of Utah and Nevada, and the intense, sobering beauty of Carmel.

The sunset is there in the western sky and it is amazing. But the path that takes me there is greater still, and it is completely worth the journey. I can vouch for that.

To read Madeleine L’Engle’s entire essay regarding the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, check out this article in the Wheaton College archives.

We all know when we’re in the middle of a fire.

I’m not talking about the wood-burning kind made up of super-hot flames. I’m talking about the kind of fire that rages on the inside, an emotional fire, the kind that leads some people to anger and others to depression. The kind of fire that leaves you second-guessing your purpose, or your current direction. Or maybe it’s a fire that feels like it’s destroying your life through loss or disappointment or failure.

Sometimes it smoulders. Sometimes it blazes through in a flash.

I can always tell when I’m in the middle of one of these fires because I start to do things that are completely unlike me. Things like getting angry at a Best Western customer service person because they told me the wrong price. Things like wanting to ram my Mac down the Mac store person’s throat because the only reason I bought AppleCare was because the woman who sold me the computer implied that it covered accidental damage. It doesn’t cover accidental damage and now I’m looking at $700 worth of repairs and weighing up whether or not throwing the Mac up against their shiny glass storefront would feel good enough to compensate for the additional financial hit I would take due to, you know, vandalism and stuff.

These are theoretical examples of course.

* * * * *

The fire rages in our lives, and in its wake we are left feeling disappointed, bitter, angry or depressed. Or all four. Or something else. The landscape of our life begins to feel charred and dead. Worthless. Mordor-like.

* * * * *

At Yellowstone National Park, I made my first acquaintance with Lodgepole Pines. A hardy species, they grow in high elevations and close together. So close together, in fact, that they thin each other out, and the dead trees fall over, leaning against the live ones. This may seem insignificant, but when a fire comes through, the leaning, dead trees provide a kind of kindling that allows the fire to race to the top of the tree line, obliterating every single tree.

The bark is also thin, lessening its resistance to heat and flames. You could say that these trees are, in some ways, built to facilitate their own death by fire.

But there’s one other thing about the Lodgepole Pine, something important, and it has to do with its pine cone. This particular cone is a prickly little son-of-a-gun, and a sticky, sappy adhesive holds it tightly shut, enclosing its seeds. The cones fall and gather on the forest floor, up to 50,000 per acre each year, but no new trees can grow, because the cones are glued shut. Nothing can open them.

Well, one thing can.

Fire.

And when that fire comes, it blazes through the Lodgepole Pines. It races up the deadwood, devouring every single tree, leaving nothing but charred, black stumps behind. Nothing but ash and death.

But it also opens up all of those pine cones, leaving millions of released seeds behind, and the seeds fall into the rich soil, and the rain and the sunlight, which can now come through, lift up a new generation of life.

* * * * *

This is what that internal fire will do for me, if I let it. It will (painfully) remove all the existing brush and deadwood and even, horror upon horrors, the living things. The things I’ve spent so much time growing and nurturing. But it also releases all the seeds of life that were stuck inside of me, the ideas and the emotions and the plans that never would have come to fruition without the fire. Without the destruction.

And the life that springs up out of that regeneration: what abundant life.