The wind in my face is probably the most alive I have felt in years. My heart is thumping into my chest, and with every pedal I grow more exhausted all the time. “Just ten miles,” I think to myself, trying to convince myself it is even possible. “Yeah, just a few more miles.” The long term goal can’t affect what I am about to do. There is only about a mile and a half separating me from when I get to stop. Yet some part of my soul longs to continue, going on and on and on, everlasting. My body, however, resists, and the aching in my knees urges me to only go these ten.
“Take it easy,” Matt said, when he finally gave his consent to the idea. “I know you want to get home fast, but take it easy. You really can’t go twenty or thirty miles a day like you plan to do. Start off, at least, just going ten miles a day. And enjoy it as you go.”
We sat in his plain white office, his vestment for the Sunday service resting on the door to provide some privacy to our conversation. I nodded, internalizing the advice.
“You’re still insane,” he smiled at me, with the knowing look that only your shepherd can give.
I smiled back sheepily, and gave him a smirk. I thought back to the lesson he had given only a few days before, covering the passage where Lazarus was raised from the dead. “Stranger things have been done,” I spat back jokingly.
A rare silence passes over us, as each one of realizes that this probably means goodbye for quite some time. That office felt like a second home to me, where I most often poured out my soul in confession and in an attempt to heal. But suddenly it felt... inadequate. Like the healing couldn’t quite come anymore. Like I had to go somewhere else.
When I first told Matt I was biking the nineteen hundred and ninety-three miles from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, to my home in Medford, Oregon, he scoffed at the very idea. He must have thought this was just another one of my hairbrained schemes, things I rushed into without much wisdom or direction put into the decision. I asserted my future as fact, and knowing how God laughs at such assertions, Matt laughed at me for even trying.
I don’t really know how I convinced him that it was true. We talked as we had for too many hours, probably taking him away from more important responsibilities. He always made the time to be there for me anyway. I don’t know how to repay that. Maybe this journey will show me.
But my knees are giving out, it seems. I have a little less than half a mile until I set down my bike and sleep, regardless of my location. I figure that the shores of Lake Waco will be a little safer than the side of the road, and that is just about ten miles for the day. I see its waters in the distance, the rare sunbeam cutting through the clouds to reveal its calm.
The waters speak to me in a way I have not heard them before. Suddenly, a quiet seems to come over my body, and I cannot hear my own shallow breathing. For the first time in a long time, I feel at peace. But that peace comes with a nagging question.
Why?
Why leave your education to pursue some strange desire about biking home? Why go home? What are you running away from?
The peace finally brings me some clarity to these questions, but the peace was quickly lost. I have known I needed to just go. To just leave where I was and search for something, but I didn’t really know what to search for or even why I was looking. I had a good life at Baylor. I did well in my classrooms, learned from great teachers, lived with wonderful human beings, and I was loved beyond what I imagined.
Sure, I suffered an unusual and unexpected breakup. But that’s not a reason to leave the community you love. Awkwardly seeing someone who you once shared your deepest secrets with is not the worst thing that could happen to a person. That sort of suffering is necessary, in one way or another. But that wasn’t it.
There was some deep longing in my soul that the breakup just revealed. I felt incomplete in some way, just lacking something that seemed essential. More than a partner, more than a church, more than happiness, I needed something. And I couldn’t find it if I stayed in the confines of that safety.
I had to go.
In the last half mile, I happen to see a deer carcass on the side of the road. Now, this isn’t my first West Virginia rodeo, as a friend once said, but something about this body touches me. It looks like a little doe, and her insides are all in the wrong places. Her stomach was large, too large for a little doe like her. I wonder if they were twins.
I try to shake the image from my mind, but I am left wondering why in the world she would have ventured so close to civilization when she was caring for two little ones inside her. It seems like deer, irrational as they might be, still have some responsibility to their children. Am I that deer? Am I abandoning my responsibilities, my loved ones, my education, my home, all on some whim?
Or did the deer go because she had to do so to live?
Is that why I had to go? Was I just drifting through life, engaging only in the intellectual sphere out of fear that really experiencing something would leave me crippled, or worse, roadkill?
The last little hill ahead of me finally succumbs to my endless pedalling, and I see the lake once again. It is now covered in the soft pink light of the sunset, and the clouds in the sky shine with a purple effervescence I cannot adequately describe. In the color, it seems the sun is smiling at its own demise, loving itself even to the end, just for the joy of doing so.
And that is why I have gone.
Day 1: Nineteen hundred and eighty-three miles to home.
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