Silent to Spoken: The Way

I leave for Spain in eighteen days.

On August 18 I fly to Bilbao and start walking. Thirty-one days and roughly three hundred and fifty miles across the north of Spain to Santiago de Compostela, and then out to the coast at Fisterra, where medieval pilgrims believed the world ended.

I have been planning the logistics for over a year. Every mile. Every bed. Every transfer.

What I had not planned was my heart.

Why I started this study

About a month ago I went looking for something to help me prepare spiritually, and I could not find it.

There is no shortage of Camino content. Packing lists. Training plans. Gear reviews. Stage-by-stage guides written by people who have walked it ten times and know exactly where the good coffee is.

But almost nothing took seriously the one thing that makes this different from a very long hike. This is a pilgrimage. And a pilgrimage asks something of you before you ever board a plane.

So I built it myself. Eighteen days. One study every morning at my kitchen table before the house wakes up.

I started today.

And I already know I am going to give it away.

The Lord watches over your coming and going both now and forevermore.Psalm 121:8

That is the verse over all eighteen days.

Psalm 121 is one of the Songs of Ascents. Pilgrims sang it on the road up to Jerusalem, with packs on and dust on their feet, three thousand years before anyone painted a yellow arrow on a wall in Spain.

It is walking music. It always was.

Here is what we are doing

Every morning between now and the day I leave, I sit down with one study.

Then I write about it here the same day, before I have had time to make it presentable.

That is the whole plan. Sit with it in the morning. Publish it in the afternoon. You read it on the same day I lived it.

Each day gives you:

• The history. Where the tradition came from and why it has survived a thousand years.
• Why it matters. What that piece of Camino history is actually teaching.
• The study. Real scripture study, not a paragraph and a nice thought.
• Dig Deeper. The word study, the context, the thing underneath the verse.
• Did You Know. The detail nobody puts in the guidebooks.
• Reflection questions. The ones you have to answer honestly for this to be worth anything.
• A prayer.
• A Camino Challenge. Something to actually do, not just think about.

You do not need a plane ticket for any of this.

If you are walking the Camino this year, this is your preparation. If you are never going to walk it, this is still yours. The questions are the same questions. The road is just where I happen to be asking them.

Why I am telling you my story

I thought about writing this series without me in it.

It would be cleaner. History, scripture, application, done. Nobody has to know anything about my life and I get to stay comfortable.

I am not going to do that, and I want to tell you why.

I have spent most of my life giving people the polished answer. The one that is true enough to be believable and clean enough to end the conversation. Ask me how I am and I will tell you I am good. Ask me why I am walking across Spain and for months I had an answer ready that made people nod and say you are so strong.

It was not the true one.

That is not lying, exactly. It is something quieter than lying, and I think most of us do it.

A pause where your voice used to be.Silent to Spoken: A Woman's Journey Through the Pause

That line is from my book. It comes out on October 6.

I wrote it about the way a life gets edited slowly. Not by one terrible thing. By a hundred small moments where you had something to say and said something easier instead.

This series is me refusing to do that for eighteen days in a row.

Some of you have known me a long time and are about to read something you did not know.

I was nineteen

My bladder has been a problem for as long as I have had memory.

I can still feel the cold of a hospital bed when I was five. There was scarring. There were more infections than anyone could keep track of. There were nights I sat in a tub of warm water because that was the only way my body would let go.

I grew up watching my mother struggle with lupus. I watched what it took from her, and somewhere in there I made a quiet decision that a lot of children make.

Not me.

At nineteen I sat in an office and was told something was wrong. That was it. Something is wrong and we cannot fully tell you what.

There is no word for what that does to a nineteen-year-old. You are handed a life that is going to be different and no explanation of how, and you are far too young to know that what you are feeling is grief. So you do not call it grief. You go back to your life and you get on with it.

I got on with it for a very long time.

Then it had a name

After my second daughter, it all arrived at once.

Lupus. Interstitial cystitis. Fibromyalgia.

What followed was six years of getting everything named, researching my way through it, and slowly climbing out of the chaos.

I had a bag of medication. I had more bad days than good ones. There was a major surgery, a full hysterectomy, and a long recovery getting my feet back under me.

And the entire time I kept showing up. As a mom. As a wife. As a church volunteer. At work.

I did not talk about it. I did not show it. There are people who have known me for years who have no idea, and that was not an accident. That was the whole strategy.

I thought avoiding made it less real.
It did not.

It made it lonelier. It made it invisible. It made it something I carried alone in a house full of people who loved me and would have helped if I had let them know there was anything to help with.

But it did not make it smaller. Not once. Not for a day.

What I never grieved

For months I told people I was walking the Camino to prove I could still do hard things.

It is a good answer. It got a lot of nods.

It was not true.

I was not proving anything to anyone. I was grieving, and I was thirty years late to it.

Silence felt safer than mourning a life I had not finished loving yet.Silent to Spoken: A Woman's Journey Through the Pause

I made peace with the diagnoses years ago in the practical sense. Medication. Appointments. Planning around flares. I am very good at logistics.

What I never grieved was the girl in that office at nineteen, and the woman she assumed she would get to become.

The one with energy that would always be there. The one who would get stronger in her fifties instead of more careful. A future she had pictured with no limits on it, back when she was still young enough to think limits happened to other people.

I skipped that part entirely. I went straight from the news to the coping, because coping does not require you to feel anything.

There is a second reason too, and it is harder to write.

There is distance between me and one of my older daughters. It is not new, and I am not going to explain it here, because half of that story is not mine to tell. For a while I told myself I was walking to process it. All those miles. All that time to think. Surely something would resolve out there.

You cannot walk your way into someone else's willingness. I know that. Knowing it and living it are not the same thing, and I suspect the road is going to ask me about it somewhere around day twelve.

So why am I really walking?

I do not know yet.

That is the honest answer and it took me eight months and a Bible study to be willing to say it out loud.

Every pilgrim account I have read says the same thing. You leave with a reason. You come home with a different one. The second one is the real one.

I am going anyway. Not knowing.

That is the part that scares me, and it is the only part that makes this a pilgrimage instead of a very long walk.

Come with me

Eighteen days. One letter each morning. Published the same day I sit with it.

Bring one journal, and use the same one all the way through.

These eighteen days are part one.

I am taking mine with me to Spain. I will read back through these pages on the trail, and I want to see how the answers I wrote at my kitchen table hold up against the road.

One journal, not two. Less to carry, and everything in one place.

Part two is the arrival. Mine will get color and get made pretty, because that is how I process things. Yours can stay a mess. It counts either way.

Write by hand if you can. Handwriting is slower than thinking, and that gap is where the honesty gets in.

• You will miss a day. Come back to the letter you left, not the one on the calendar. This is not a streak and nobody is counting.
• Answer honestly or do not answer at all. A polite answer to a hard question is worse than no answer, because it lets you believe you dealt with it.
• Nobody is reading your journal but you.

I will see you this afternoon in Letter One. We are starting with the question underneath all of it.

Why do pilgrims walk?

What is the polished answer you have been giving? And what is the one underneath it? Write me back below. I read every one.