At Some Point, You Just Have to Start Walking

The night before you begin a long walk is always slightly ridiculous. You lay everything out on the floor of a rented room and stare at it. Two shirts. A jacket that may not be warm enough. A small bag of things you were sure you needed in the shop and are now certain you did not.

Preparation has a limit

There is a point in every good thing where preparation stops being wisdom and starts being avoidance. I have known men who studied maps of the Camino for a decade. I have known Christians who read about discipleship for just as long.

The road does not begin when you understand it. It begins when you walk it.

At six in the morning the street is wet and the town is asleep. Nobody applauds. That is worth saying plainly, because a great deal of Christian imagination is built around a beginning that feels like a beginning.

The first hour is the worst

Your pack sits wrong. Your feet argue. You wonder whether the whole thing was a sentimental idea. And then, somewhere in the second hour, the arguing stops and the walking becomes the only thing happening, and it turns out that this — not the planning — is what you actually came for.

Jesus did not hand out a curriculum. He said follow me, which is a verb that requires legs.

What the road strips

Every kilometre removes something. First the extra weight in the pack. Then the plan. Then the version of yourself that needed the plan.

By the fourth day I was praying the way a tired person prays, which I have come to think is the honest way: short sentences, no performance, the same request repeated because it is genuinely the request.

The road to Santiago is not holy ground. It is a long series of ordinary mornings, and that is exactly why it works. Most of following Jesus happens on ordinary mornings, in weather you did not choose, going somewhere you cannot yet see.

At some point you just have to start walking.