Have you ever had your entire life planned out?
I went to college for accounting.
I want you to sit with that for a second, because it tells you everything about who I was. I did not pick a field where things are uncertain. I picked the one where the columns balance or they do not, where there is a right answer, where at the end of the day you can point at a number and say that is correct.
I assumed that was the whole story. Degree, career, promotion, retirement. A life you can see the end of from the beginning.
That is not what happened.
In my forties I started completely over from scratch.
The balloons
A few years before that, I booked a same-day flight.
I barely packed. I flew into Atlanta and drove several hours to my parents' house. Nobody knew I was coming except my husband.
It was my dad's birthday and I walked in with balloons.
He was so happy to see me.
It would be the last birthday we got to celebrate together.
He was in a wheelchair by then.
There had been a car wreck years earlier that left him changed, and then a long series of health struggles after it. He passed away several years later, in his fifties.
You need to understand who my dad was before that chair.
He was a hero type. A cowboy. The man who could do anything, fix anything, handle anything, and would not have wanted help even if you offered. That was not just how he acted. That was how he understood himself.
And now he needed people. For most things.
I know what that cost him. He never said it, and he did not have to.
Something changed in me sitting in that room.
What he said
He told me not to live with regrets. He told me not to wait until it was too late.
People say things like that. It sounds like a greeting card until you hear it from a man in a wheelchair who is not going to get another chance at any of it.
But that was not really the part that undid me.
It was that he was describing me, and he was doing it accurately, and I had never once said any of it out loud.
He knew what I had spent my life doing. Be the best wife. Three meals a day. Be the mom at every event. Take the kids to church. Work the nine to five. Buy the house with the picket fence. Have the family pet. Entertain the friends. Be the perfect daughter.
Be the peacekeeper.
He had watched all of it. And what he wanted for me was to live. To travel. To see and do the things he did not get to.
A man who could no longer go anywhere looked at a daughter who could go anywhere and was not going, and told her to go.
He said out loud the thing I had never been able to say about my own life.
That is the part I keep coming back to.
I had been living a life I never consciously chose, and I had no language for it. Not because I did not feel it. Because naming it would have meant doing something about it, and doing something about it would have disappointed people.
My dad named it in about four sentences from a wheelchair.
I thought I had the rest of my life to figure out what to do with that. He was in his fifties. I did not have as much time as I assumed, and neither did he.
Then I left the boat
Eventually I left. The paycheck. The nine to five. The security, the safety, the thing my whole education had pointed at.
I want to be careful not to make that sound brave. It was terrifying. It is still terrifying.
I have physically done it. I took the step. And there are still mornings I feel like I am drowning and have no idea what the next one is.
My book comes out on October 6 and I do not know what that is going to look like. Is anyone going to buy it. Do I need a marketing plan. What is the strategy. I wrote it over several years out of a life spent people-pleasing, one moment at a time slowly handing my voice away, and now it is about to exist in the world and I am an accountant who does not have a spreadsheet for this.
So no, I did not get certainty by leaving. I got a different set of questions.
Here is the part that keeps me going.
I could not see it on day one
When I started the podcast, I thought I knew what it was.
Two best friends telling their midlife stories. The chaos. Dating. Divorce. Becoming an empty nester. Honest, funny, a little messy.
That is not what it became.
It became me finding my own voice. Learning what healthy communication actually sounds like. Learning boundaries in my forties like a person learning a language late. It turned into an entirely new career as a coach, and then a book, and then a community of people showing up for each other.
I could not see one bit of that on day one. Not a single piece of it.
I have wondered whether James felt any of this when he put down his nets and started walking. Whether he had doubts. Whether he lay awake wondering why. Whether he had any idea.
He did not. He could not have.
That is the whole point of the story.
Camino History
Millions of people walk to Santiago de Compostela, which simply means St. James, and most of them could not tell you a single thing about the man.
James was ordinary. He was the son of Zebedee, a successful fisherman on the Sea of Galilee. His mother, Salome, was among the women who followed Jesus and who were there at the crucifixion.
He worked alongside his father and his younger brother John. Fishing was not just a job. It was the family business, the family identity, the financial security, and almost certainly the inheritance. James likely expected to spend his entire life on that water.
Then Jesus walked past.
Among the twelve, three were brought into moments the others did not see. Peter, James, and John. They watched Jesus raise a little girl from the dead. They stood on the mountain when his glory was revealed. They went further into the garden with him on the night he was arrested.
Jesus also gave James and John a nickname. Boanerges. Sons of Thunder. Scripture never fully explains it, though there are clues. When a Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus, these two asked whether they should call down fire from heaven.
They were a lot. Jesus did not tell them to be less. He aimed them somewhere.
God usually works that way. He does not erase your personality. He redirects it.
Following cost James everything. Acts 12 records that Herod Agrippa arrested believers to gain political favor, and that James was the first of the twelve to be killed. Scripture gives it one sentence. He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword.
One sentence, and behind it an entire life.
Tradition holds that James preached in what is now Spain before returning to Jerusalem, and that after his execution his followers carried his body by sea to Galicia. Centuries later the tomb was found, a cathedral rose over it, and pilgrims began arriving from every corner of Europe.
The relics were lost for almost three hundred years, and it was on purpose.
In 1589, with Sir Francis Drake raiding the Spanish coast and threatening to sack Santiago, the archbishop had the remains hidden somewhere inside the cathedral for safekeeping.
Then everyone who knew the location died, and the knowledge went with them.
The relics were not found again until 1879, during excavation work behind the high altar. Pilgrims had been walking to that cathedral for centuries without anyone actually knowing where the tomb was.
Here is why James matters to you today.
The Camino is not ultimately about him. It is about following the same Jesus he followed. James simply shows us what it looks like to go before you understand.
Look at what he walked away from. The boat. The nets. The family business. Financial security. Predictability. His own plans. Eventually his life.
And he did it without a single guarantee about how any of it would turn out.
Scripture Study
Matthew 4:18 through 22
Walking by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus sees two brothers casting a net and calls them to follow him, saying he will make them fishers of people. They leave their nets at once. Going on, he sees James and John in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets, and calls them. Immediately they leave the boat and their father and follow him.
Notice what Jesus offers and what he withholds.
Follow me. That is it. No explanation of the future. No promise of comfort. No plan, no timeline, no description of where this ends.
James does not ask for one. Matthew records that they left immediately.
And notice who is still in the boat when they walk away.
Zebedee. Their father. He is right there in the verse, and the text does not tell us what his face did. He stays. They go. Scripture does not explain how that conversation went, or whether there was one.
I have thought about Zebedee more than James lately.
Because my father was in the boat too, in a way. And what he did with the little he had left was tell me to get out of it.
Dig Deeper
There is a detail in Matthew 4:21 that most people read straight past.
James and John were not fishing when Jesus found them. They were mending their nets.
The Greek word is katartizo. It means to repair something torn, to put it back in working order, to restore it to what it was made to be.
That same word shows up elsewhere in the New Testament, and not about fishing gear. Paul uses it when he tells the Corinthians to be restored. It appears again about gently restoring someone who has fallen. It is a word about people being made whole.
So James is sitting in a boat repairing something torn, and the man who repairs torn people walks by and says follow me.
I do not think the writer chose that word by accident.
One more thing. The word for immediately, eutheos, appears more in Matthew and Mark than almost anywhere else, and it is one of the fastest words in the New Testament. There is no gap in that verse. No week of prayer. No conversation with Zebedee that we are told about.
That is not a model for reckless decisions. It is a record of what it looks like when someone finally hears the thing they have been waiting to hear.
Reflection Questions
Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.
- What did James trust when he left those nets?
- What do my nets represent? The security, the identity, the thing I am not sure I know who I am without.
- What has someone in my life named about me that I have never been able to say out loud myself?
- What am I holding onto because I cannot see how it turns out if I let go?
- If Jesus said follow me today, what would make me hesitate?
Prayer
Father,
Thank You for James, who left a boat without knowing where the road went.
Thank You for the people who have loved me enough to tell me the truth about my own life, especially when it cost them something to say it.
Show me what I have been holding more tightly than I have been holding You.
Give me courage for the part I cannot see.
I do not need the whole plan. Just the next step.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Camino Challenge
Draw two columns in your journal.
Head the left one What I Am Leaving Behind. Write everything that has become too heavy to carry into this next season. Fear. Shame. People-pleasing. Resentment. Perfectionism. The need to control how it ends.
Head the right one What I Am Walking Toward. Write what you hope God grows in you. Peace. Courage. Freedom. Deeper faith. Forgiveness. Your own voice.
Date the page.
Come back to it in six months and notice not only what you left, but who you became because you chose to go.
Tomorrow We'll Walk…
There is not one Camino. There are many.
The famous one from France. The hard one along the northern coast. The oldest one through the mountains. The one that climbs the entire length of Spain from Seville.
Every one of them ends in the same square.
Pilgrims agonize over the choice. Which is most beautiful. Which is most authentic. Which one will make me a real pilgrim.
Tomorrow we are going to talk about why that question is the wrong one, and about a psalm that people have been singing on the road for three thousand years.
What are your nets? Write me back below. I read every one.
Don't quit in the quiet.
Sharing love,
~ Jenn