Today, finally, the arrows.
Read First
Proverbs 3:5 and 6
It is two verses and you have probably heard them a hundred times. Read them anyway. I am going to show you something in the Hebrew at the end that I did not know until this morning.
Camino History
The yellow arrows are much newer than almost anyone assumes. Not medieval. Not even from the last century's beginning. They come down to one man.
Elías Valiña Sampedro was the parish priest of O Cebreiro, a tiny stone village at the top of a mountain pass, for more than thirty years. When he arrived in the 1950s, that village might see one pilgrim in a year. The Camino was nearly forgotten. Sections of it were impassable.
He wrote his doctoral thesis on it. He studied it for decades. And in 1984 he decided studying was not enough.
He started at Roncesvalles with a small car and cans of yellow paint and began marking the way himself. At the tricky crossroads. On rocks and stone walls and the sides of buildings. In his free time, around parish work, with volunteers he recruited from his own family.
And here is the part I love.
He used yellow because he had leftover road paint. That is the entire reason.
He marked the stretch near his own village, looked at how much was left, and kept going.
Nobody chose that color for its meaning. It was what was in the bucket.
Don Elías died in 1989, five years after he started. He did not live to see what it became.
There is a story about him that has passed into legend on the Camino, and most people who walk it can tell you some version.
He was up in the Pyrenees near the French border, painting arrows. This was a tense period in Spain, and the Guardia Civil noticed a man marking mysterious symbols across the mountains near a frontier.
They stopped him and asked what he was doing.
He told them he was preparing an invasion.
The versions differ on what happened next, and some tellings have him taken in for questioning. But the line has survived because it turned out to be true. The invasion came. It just arrived on foot, one pilgrim at a time, for the next forty years.
Here is how they actually work out there.
You see one. You walk. Eventually you see another. Between them there is nothing at all, and you are simply trusting that the next one is coming.
Sometimes the gap is long enough that you start to doubt. You slow down. You check your phone. And then there it is, faded, on the base of a wall, exactly where it always was.
The arrows never show you Santiago. Not once. You could walk five hundred miles and never see a marker that tells you where the whole thing ends.
They only ever show you the next turn.
If they did more than that, you would not need faith.
Thursday, October 16
I know the exact day this started.
It was a Thursday last October. Nothing about it was significant. It was not a Sunday, New Year's Day, my birthday, or the anniversary of anything.
I woke up sad. Looking back, I realize I was grieving. Everything around me was changing. Relationships were ending. I did not have language for most of it yet, and I certainly was not looking for a project.
Then I saw a video of a man walking the Camino, talking about his journey.
I did not book anything. I did not research anything. I favorited it.
That is what an arrow actually looks like at the time. Not a bolt of certainty. Just something catching, and you saving it, because you cannot quite let it go and you are not ready to do anything about it.
Later that same afternoon I turned on the TV, and Peacock had just added a film called The Way. About a father walking the Camino de Santiago.
I prayed. I watched it. I cried through most of it.
And then, that night, I opened my Bible app and it recommended a study plan.
It was called The Way.
Three marks in one day. None of which I went looking for. None of which I painted.
You never see Santiago on a marker. You only ever see the turn.
I started that plan the same day. It was eight days long. I finished it on Thursday, October 23, and I started planning the Camino that week.
Ten months later, I am getting on a plane.
Looking back, it would be easy to believe that is where this journey began.
It was not.
My dad was the first arrow.
What he actually said
You met him in Letter Two. The birthday, the balloons, the wheelchair.
He passed away not long after. And when I looked backward, I realized I have been following what he told me for years and never once called it following arrows.
What I did not tell you in Letter Two was what he actually said, or why it landed the way it did.
My dad had regrets. Real ones. He had spent years saying I will do it when I retire. I will do it when I am older.
He never got there.
So what he told me, from that chair, was not a greeting card about seizing the day. It was specific and it was hard.
Let go. Surrender. Live.
Quit trying to control everything. Stop needing the whole five year plan before you move.
Without ever knowing it, a man in a wheelchair described the yellow arrows to me.
And I think he knew something else too.
I was not happy where I was. I do not think I had admitted it out loud to anyone, including myself. But he could see it.
So here is what followed.
I stepped out into social media marketing. That pointed me toward starting a podcast. The podcast pointed me toward retiring early. Retiring early sent me back to school. School put me back into writing, which I had stopped doing years before. Writing turned into coaching, and walking with people sitting in the messy middle of midlife.
And that made me an author. Officially, in eight weeks.
Not one of those showed me the next one. Every single one only made sense after I had already taken it.
That is a bucket of leftover paint and a priest marking one crossroads at a time. Don Elías was not building a route across a continent. He was marking a turn, and then another turn, and a route is what it turned into.
My dad spent years saying he would do it when he retired.
I retired early.
I am not going to explain that sentence. I just want it sitting there.
The version where I did not go
Here is the part that makes this real to me rather than a nice idea about faith.
If I had not followed that first arrow, I would still be sitting in the same house, doing the same job.
I can see it clearly. I could describe the room.
Nothing would have been wrong, exactly. And I would have been unhappy in a way I had gotten very good at not mentioning.
No podcast. No coaching. No community. No book.
And I would never have known what I missed, which is the part that frightens me most. You do not get told what the alternative was. You take the turn or you do not, and the road you did not walk stays invisible forever.
Which is where I am standing right now.
Eleven days from a plane. Eight weeks from a book I am afraid of. I have followed seven marks to get here and I cannot see the next one at all.
I am scared and excited and happy and afraid, all four at once, and I have stopped trying to resolve that before I go.
I know life here will not stop while I am gone. The world keeps running for thirty-one days without me in it, and I come home to whatever moved.
I also know I will not be the same woman who packs her bags and boards that plane.
That is all I have. It turns out that is enough to walk on.
What to do when you cannot find the next one
Every experienced pilgrim knows the rule.
If you have not seen a mark in a while, do not invent a route.
Go back to the last one you were sure of.
This is the most important thing in this letter, and it is not really about walking.
When we let the world in, we start to sink. Not because we are weak. Because the world is loud and constant, and the arrows are small and painted by hand and easy to walk past.
So you lose the mark. It happens to all of us. And when it does, you go back to where you last knew you were on the path. Your Bible study. Your community. A season when you actually heard Him.
Going back is not failure.
It does not erase the days you showed up. It just means sometimes we have to go back to know how to go forward.
Scripture Study
Proverbs 3:5 and 6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.
This gets quoted so often that it has almost stopped meaning anything.
Read it slowly and notice what it does not promise.
It does not say God will explain Himself. It does not say you will understand. It specifically says do not lean on your own understanding, which means your understanding is going to want something it is not going to be given.
The promise is not clarity.
The promise is a straight path, made straight by someone other than you.
Dig Deeper
The Hebrew behind make straight is where this stopped being a comfort verse for me this morning.
The word carries the sense of clearing or leveling a road ahead of a traveler. It is construction language. Removing obstacles. Smoothing ground. Making a way passable. It is the same family of imagery Isaiah uses about preparing a highway in the wilderness.
So the verse is not saying your life will make sense. It is saying somebody is out in front of you with a bucket and a brush.
You do not see the work. You were not there when it happened. You just find the road passable when you get to it, and a mark on a wall when you needed one.
Don Elías died five years in. He never met a single one of the millions of people who have found their way because of him.
Somebody went ahead of you and marked the turn.
You will probably never know who.
Reflection
Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.
- Where have I been demanding an explanation instead of taking a next step?
- When have I invented a route because I could not stand not knowing?
- What was the last thing I was genuinely sure God asked of me? Have I done it?
- What arrows have I already followed without ever calling them that?
- If I could only see the next turn, what would it be?
Prayer
Father,
I want the map and You keep handing me the next arrow.
Forgive me for the times I wandered off rather than wait, and for the routes I invented because not knowing felt unbearable.
Give me the humility to go back to the last thing You made clear, and to start there without calling it failure.
Thank You for going ahead of me on roads I did not know were being cleared.
Make my path straight, even where I cannot see it.
Help me trust the next arrow more than my need for the whole map.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Camino Challenge
I know these challenges can feel like a lot. We are seven days in and I keep asking you to look at your life and your choices and the things you have not said.
So I will go first.
Draw a yellow arrow across your page, pointing right.
Then three things.
- At the tail, on the left, write your go back place. Where were you standing when you could still see clearly? A season. A practice. A church. A study. Something specific enough that you could actually return to it.
- Along the arrow, write one action you could take this week. Small and specific enough that you would know tomorrow whether you did it.
- Underneath, write what is in the way. Be honest. Not the noble version.
Here is mine.
Don Elías had to be standing on that road before he could mark it.
Tomorrow We'll Walk…
Almost every pilgrim who gets injured on the Camino got injured because they refused to stop.
Not because they were unfit. Because they were determined.
Tomorrow we talk about rest days, and about the particular guilt that shows up when everyone you have been walking with leaves in the morning and your pack is still in the corner.
And about a passage where Jesus tells a group of exhausted people to go away and rest, in the middle of the crowd, before the work was anywhere close to finished.
What was the last clear thing you believe God asked of you? Write me back below. I read every one.
Don't quit in the quiet.
Sharing love,
~ Jenn