I went walking with a friend last week.
A new friend, which means she was still asking all the questions. The ones people stop asking once they think they know you. Where are you from. How many kids. What do you do.
I had an answer ready for every one of them.
Then she asked why I was walking the Camino.
And I stopped.
Not for effect. I genuinely did not have the sentence. For a full year I had known exactly what to say to that question, and standing on a sidewalk next to a woman I had known for about three weeks, it was gone.
So I told her the truth.
The Camino called me in a season when I was broken. I do not know why. I think the why is part of the journey.
She just nodded and kept walking, and we talked about something else, and I have been thinking about it every day since.
Here is what had changed.
For a year I thought I knew why I was going. I had reasons. Good ones. The kind you can say at a dinner table and everyone nods.
Then I started listening, and what came back after my prayers at night was not answers. It was more questions.
I have been questioning nearly everything I once prayed for.
I want to be careful with that sentence, because I know how it sounds two months before a book comes out.
I love this work. I love writing. I love the community that has grown up around it, and I do not take a single one of you for granted.
And I am tired. And I am not sure. Both of those are true at the same time, and I think most of us have been there with something we were called to. You can love the thing and be worn out by it. You can be certain God asked for it and still lie awake wondering whether you heard Him right.
But if I am honest about what actually keeps me up, it is not the workload.
It is that a book does not come back.
Once it prints, it is out there. Forever. Every honest thing I put in it stays honest in public whether or not I feel strong that week. I am healing in real time and I have handed people a front row seat to it.
That is not easy. I do not think it is supposed to be.
It is also, I think, the reason the book matters. There was no version of it I could have written from the other side of the healing, safely, once everything had resolved. That book would have been tidier and it would have been useless.
So a few nights ago I stopped asking for clarity and told God the truth instead.
I do not know the plan. I do not understand.
All I know is I need You to carry me.
That was the most honest prayer I have prayed in a long time. What came back was not an explanation. It was a pull. A desire to stop asking and start sitting with Him.
That is where this study came from. Not a content plan. A prayer that did not get answered.
For a year I had a reason for this walk. Last week, on a sidewalk next to a woman I barely knew, I finally said out loud that I do not know.
It turns out that was the more faithful answer.
Faith was never knowing the whole journey. Faith is trusting God enough to take the next step.
Camino History
For more than a thousand years, people have walked to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.
They walked through wars. Through plagues. Through centuries when the trip itself could kill you, and when leaving home for a year meant you might not have a home to come back to.
The route began after remains believed to belong to the Apostle James were discovered around A.D. 813. Tradition holds that his followers carried his body by sea from Jerusalem to Galicia after his execution, and that the burial place was forgotten for centuries until a shepherd noticed strange lights over a field. When the tomb was uncovered, Christians believed they had found St. James.
Some say the name Compostela comes from the Latin Campus Stellae. Field of stars. Historians argue about whether that is accurate, and it does not much matter. The image held. Pilgrims followed the stars. Now they follow yellow arrows.
By the Middle Ages the Camino had become one of Christianity's three great pilgrimages, alongside Jerusalem and Rome. At its height, hundreds of thousands crossed Europe on foot every year. Today pilgrims come from more than a hundred and eighty countries.
The word pilgrim comes from the Latin peregrinus. One who travels through foreign lands.
But notice what that word does not say. It does not say tourist. It does not say traveler. A pilgrim is not simply someone who goes somewhere. A pilgrim is someone who lets the going change them.
The world's first travel guidebook was written for pilgrims on this road.
The Codex Calixtinus, compiled around 1140, includes a section that reads almost exactly like a modern guide. It lists the stages. It tells you which rivers are safe to drink from and which will kill your horse. It warns you about specific innkeepers who will cheat you and specific ferrymen who overload their boats.
It also describes the people of each region, sometimes unkindly, in the way travel writers have always done.
Nine hundred years later, pilgrims are still trading exactly this information in albergues at night.
Here is why any of this matters to you.
Every pilgrim who has ever walked this road arrived carrying something.
Some carried grief. Some carried fear. Some carried a diagnosis. Some carried a prayer they had stopped saying out loud because it had never been answered. Some carried a dream they had buried so long ago they would have been embarrassed to name it.
And almost none of them could tell you why they went. Not really.
They gave a reason at the door and found a different one somewhere around week three.
That is not a failure of self-knowledge. That is the design. The Camino has never been about escaping your life. It has always been about returning to it differently.
A vacation changes your scenery. A pilgrimage changes your heart.
A vacation asks what you can experience. What you can consume. What memories you can bring home.
A pilgrimage asks who you are being invited to become. What you need to release. What still needs healing. What is waiting on the other side of surrender.
You may take a thousand photographs out there. The thing you actually bring home is the person you became.
Scripture Study
Hebrews 11:13 through 16
The writer describes people who lived by faith and died without receiving what they had been promised. They saw it from a distance and welcomed it, and admitted they were foreigners and strangers on earth. They were longing for a better country. And because of that longing, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Read the whole chapter if you have time. Hebrews 11 is a roll call of people who trusted God and did not get to see how it turned out.
Noah built a boat for a flood nobody could see coming. Abraham left home for a land he had never laid eyes on. Moses walked away from a palace.
And then there is Sarah.
If you have never read this part, here it is. Sarah was ninety years old and had never been able to have children. She overhears God telling her husband she is going to have a son, and she laughs. Out loud. At God. Then she gets embarrassed and denies it, and God says, plainly, yes you did.
She is on the list anyway.
That is worth sitting with if you have ever wondered whether your doubt disqualifies you. The woman who laughed in God's face is named among the faithful, and nothing in the text apologizes for her.
Then the writer stops the list and makes one observation about all of them at once.
They admitted they were foreigners and strangers on earth.
That is not despair. Read it again. They were not complaining about not belonging. They were acknowledging it, and the acknowledgment is what freed them to keep going.
They knew they were passing through. So they stopped trying to make a permanent home out of a temporary place.
Dig Deeper
Five words to watch as you read Hebrews 11. Faith. Foreigners. Strangers. Longing. Better country.
The Greek word behind strangers is parepidemos. It describes someone staying temporarily in a place that is not theirs. A resident alien. Someone with a return address somewhere else.
It is the same word Peter uses when he addresses believers scattered across the ancient world. Not a metaphor for spiritual homelessness. A legal term about status.
And the word for longing, oregomai, means to stretch toward. To reach for something out of your grasp. It is a physical word. Your body doing the wanting.
Now put those two together, because that is the whole passage.
They knew they did not belong here. And they kept stretching toward something they could not reach.
That is the internal condition of every pilgrim who has ever walked this road, and if you are reading this, it is probably yours too. Something in you knows you are not home. Something in you keeps reaching.
The question this chapter asks is not whether you feel restless. It is whether you are willing to call the restlessness what it is.
Reflection Questions
Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.
- Why am I really walking, or really doing the thing I am doing? Not the answer I give. The one underneath it.
- What have I been calling certainty that is actually a rehearsed answer?
- What am I carrying that has become too heavy?
- Where have I been asking God for clarity when what I actually need is to be carried?
- If God meets me somewhere in this, what do I hope is different when it is over?
Prayer
Father,
Thank You for calling people to walk with You for a thousand years, and for calling me now.
Before I take a single step, begin walking through my heart.
I do not know the plan. I do not understand it. I am not going to pretend otherwise anymore.
Carry me.
Give me eyes to see. Give me ears to hear. Give me a heart willing to be changed.
Make this more than a trip. Make it a pilgrimage.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Camino Challenge
Write one sentence that finishes this statement.
When this is over, I hope I am someone who ______.
Do not seal it. Do not hide it. Leave it open in your journal.
Come back to it as we go. Add to it. Cross things out. Let it change while you do.
On Letter Seventeen I am going to ask you to read it again, and then write the final version. But that only works if this first one is honest, and if you wrote it before you knew anything.
Tomorrow We'll Walk…
Tomorrow we meet the man whose name every pilgrim on this road knows and almost nobody can tell you anything about.
Before he was a saint, before there was a cathedral or a city or a route across a continent, James was a fisherman standing in his father's boat.
Jesus walked past and said two words.
Matthew tells us what James did next, and it is the part that should stop you. He does not say James considered it. He does not say James went home and prayed about it and came back in a week.
Immediately, he left the boat.
Tomorrow we are going to look at what that cost him, and what your boat is.
What is the question you have stopped being able to answer? Write me back below. I read every one.
Don't quit in the quiet.
Sharing love,
~ Jenn