The Walk and Miles to Go by Richard Paul Evans

I found this suitcase at the flea market, $4!

The manager, my friend, asked me, "Going on a trip?"

I've learned..

Life is a trip, a journey.

I just finished the second book in The Walk Series, Miles to Go, by Richard Paul Evans.

It's a good, clean read. No profanity or sex. Just plain truth. Reality is usually not pretty.

In The Walk, Alan Christoffersen loses everything and finds himself searching for hope at the bottom of a bottle and a handful of pills. He instead chooses to embark upon a journey both physical and spiritual, The Walk. Alan keeps a diary and he says, "Some might call it a love story. Those without love will call it a travelogue. To me, it is one man's journey to find hope. There are things that happened to me that you might not believe. There were lessons learned that you might not be ready for. No matter. Accept or dismiss what you will. But let me warn you in advance-which is more than I got-that what you read won't be easy. But it's a story worth telling. It's the story of my walk."

Richard Paul Evans expresses Alan's journey well. "We plan our lives in long, unbroken stretches that intersect our dreams the way highways connect the city dots on a road map. But in the end we learn that life is lived in the side roads, alleys, and detours."

I've had a few of those detours myself. Some of the people I love the most feel stuck in a permanent detour and wonder where the road will end on this unknown route they have not chosen for themselves. Ever thought "someone switched the tracks beneath me?."

Alan's feelings expressed by Evans relates, "There are moments in all lives, great and small, that we must trudge our forlorn roads into infinite wilderness, to endure our midnight hours of pain and sorrow-the Gethsemane moments, when we are on our knees and backs, crying out to a universe that seems to have abandoned us. These are the greatest of moments, where we show our souls. These are our "finest hours." That these moments are given to us is neither accidental or cruel. Without great mountains we cannot reach great heights. And we were born to reach great heights."

There's a song, "Don't take my burdens or my cross away."

My mama said, "You haven't carried by burdens or you would ask God to take them away."

So while we may think we understand what someone else is going through, we can not. While we may sympathize, pain is personal. Every person's journey though that pain is unique.

Someone said to me, "Don't you think your mama would want you to be happy that she and your daddy are in heaven right know?"

To which I replied, "My mama would want me to be, feel, and experience wherever I am at this moment." She understood that life is just that-LIFE, a journey of which we don't choose. She often said, "Cry when you need to cry. Take your feelings to God-even your anger. He knows them anyway."

So when we are tempted to judge someone, remember each person's journey is different and pain is unique.

I am learning to simply walk at my own pace, in my own pain clinging to faith in what and WHO I can't see. Knowing that HE knows where the road will end, does in fact make the Miles to Go easier.