It has been a long time since I left on my Mystery Tour. This time, last year, we had only a few weeks left till departure time, and a mountain of household effects to get into storage. After ten years of living on the farm we were pretty well entrenched. But it was all very exciting. And what an itinerary we had planned!
We were looking for gold.
Up hills, down hills, off the beaten path to out-of-the-way places… some where only ghosts visited anymore. Did we find any gold? Yes. And to this day, I carry it around in the bottom of my purse to remind me of that fact. Did I slake my thirst for prospecting? Not hardly. Once you're hooked, you're hooked. But we also found gold of a very different sort, that turned out to be a lot more valuable for us than the other kind.
It has to do with our search for divine appointments (do they really exist?), and what might happen if our dreams somehow collided with God's plan for our lives (is there one of those for everybody?). Not only are these fascinating subjects, but to actually encounter such things could turn a person's entire life on its ear. Which it did. And I told exactly how that happened in the wonderful anthology 21 STORIES OF FAITH by Shelley Hitz.
In company with twenty other stories of people bumping into the same kind of stuff. How encouraging is that? Enough to keep us going on, instead of going home, that's for sure. Because it has also occurred to the Captain and I that if God provided us with this boat in such a miraculous way, He just might have somewhere He would like to take us in it. Right?
So, we will be leaving Liberty Bay on June first. Heading north. That's all we know so far. But considering how things went last year, that's plenty! Here's hoping you will all come along for the ride. To keep us on track, give us your advice (this time, we'll be doing a lot of stuff we've never done before. Yikes!), and maybe even help us to feel not so alone in some of the wilderness places we will be traveling through. At the moment, I'm thinking about bears.
But I guess I'll talk about that next time.
