I eventually made it into and through the tiny town of Dublin, where everything was long-since closed, and I was feeling extremely tired and very thirsty and I couldn’t even find a rickety bench upon which to sit or even an outside spicket from whence to drink. Fortunately I then came across a 24 hour fitness club on the far outskirts of town, and even more fortunately there was a lone exerciser therein (by the name of Stone) who opened its doors and provided me with a blessed drink of cool water at roughly 3am. He then gave me some directions to the nearby Dublin Baptist Church (which I would have missed had I kept walking down the highway), and I weavingly ambled thereto and collapsed there to gratefully sleep for the rest of the almost-done night …

“Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is rather our human psychological hazard to settle for little or less than – to settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to a far more exquisite holiness; to settle for safety & the fear-driven when a greater Love longs instead to be our engine; to settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to a wildly inclusive and larger-than-any-limit Godhead. We settle for what is comfortable and convenient and allow our sense of the Divine to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship and build intimate community with all. We settle for reasonable complaints & justified whinings when gratitude sits right before us, smiling quietly and waiting to hold our hand … Getting lost in the ego’s smaller successes prevents us from flowing with the bigger picture – the interconnected grandeur that makes it all worthwhile … The fight for joy is first and always a fight to Love, and the fight to Love is ever preceded by the struggle to more clearly See.” ~ inspired by Grehory Boyle, J. R. Wirth & John Piper

Filed under: Peace Pilgrimage #02: Walking HOME (2019) by Scaughdt