And So We Went

I can probably count on one hand the number of times in my life when I have clearly—clearly—heard God speak to me.

I know people talk about prayer and discernment, about feeling that God is leading them toward something or away from something. I have experienced that, too. But there have been a handful of moments in my life that were different.

There was no discernment.

There was an instruction.

One of the clearest happened in 2015 when I lived in Connecticut.

I was driving home from an appointment with a chiropractor who also happened to be a friend of mine. Her office was about forty-five minutes from my house, and I was still probably half an hour from home when I exited one highway to connect with another.

Near the exit was a gas station in an area of town where I wouldn’t ordinarily have stopped. Standing alongside the road was an older black gentleman with his thumb out.

A hitchhiker.

Nobody picks up hitchhikers anymore.

That’s an old concept. Something people used to do before we all learned exactly how many terrible things can happen when you invite a complete stranger into your car.

And I was a woman driving alone.

So, obviously, I kept driving.

But as I passed him, I had one very clear thought: Nobody is going to pick that man up.

I drove a little farther.

And then I heard it.

Turn around and go get him.

I remember pausing.

Okay. That was strange.

I kept driving.

Then I heard it again.

Turn around and go get him.

And that’s when I began arguing with God.

God, I know this is not You.

Because this was outside my comfort zone.

My comfort zone was comfortable. That’s the entire point of a comfort zone. It’s like a couch. I’m already sitting down. I don’t want to get up. I’m comfortable here.

And picking up a strange man hitchhiking in an unsafe part of town was very much not on my couch.

So I kept driving.

But the voice didn’t go away.

It became louder. More insistent.

Turn around and go get him.

Finally, reluctantly, I turned the car around.

And almost immediately, I began negotiating with God.

Okay. Fine. I’m turning around.

But I had already figured out what was really happening.

This was a test of obedience.

That was all.

I thought about Abraham taking Isaac up the mountain. God asked Abraham to do something incomprehensible. Abraham obeyed. He climbed the mountain. He prepared to sacrifice his own son.

But God stopped him.

The obedience was what had been required.

Surely, I decided, this was my considerably less dramatic version of Abraham and Isaac.

God didn’t actually expect me to put this strange man in my car. That wasn’t prudent. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t smart.

God simply wanted to know whether I would turn around.

So I would turn around.

I would drive all the way back to that gas station. I would demonstrate my admirable obedience. And when I arrived, the man would be gone.

God and I would both know that I had been willing.

Lesson learned.

No hitchhiker required.

The closer I got, the more certain I became.

He’s going to be gone.

A few more minutes.

He’s definitely going to be gone.

Then the gas station came into view.

And there he was.

Still standing exactly where I had left him.

Well.

Apparently, God wasn’t interested in hypothetical obedience that day.

I pulled into the gas station.

The man had been standing on the right side of the road when I’d originally passed him, so I turned left into the parking lot, drove over to where he was standing, and rolled down my window.

“Do you need a ride?”

His answer has stayed with me ever since.

He told me that he’d been standing there for a long time, trying to get someone to stop.

And then he told me that he had prayed.

He had asked God to please send him an angel who would help him get home.

“And He sent me you.”

I don’t remember exactly what I said in response.

But apparently, I was picking up the hitchhiker.

He got into my car.

Then came another surprise.

Of all the places he could have been trying to get to, he was going to Bristol.

My town.

So we had about thirty minutes together.

Mostly, he talked.

I listened.

I remember these funny little sunglasses he was wearing. They weren’t really sunglasses at all. They were those flimsy, curled-up disposable things the eye doctor gives you after dilating your pupils so you don’t walk outside and immediately feel as though you’ve stared directly into the sun.

He had just had an eye examination—a glaucoma screening, as I remember it.

He told me he’d gone to that particular doctor because he was a veteran, and that was where he’d been sent to have the examination done without having to pay for it.

Then he started telling me about his life.

He had struggled with addiction.

He had been homeless.

And now he was neither.

He had finally gotten his own place.

He was so proud of that.

Not embarrassed about where he had been. Not consumed by everything that had gone wrong. Proud of where he was going.

He told me about the life he was building, about overcoming addiction, about finally having a home of his own, and about starting again.

And what struck me most wasn’t the hardship.

It was his resilience.

Here was a man who had every reason to define himself by what had happened before, and instead he seemed almost entirely focused on what came next.

Keep going.

Keep rebuilding.

Keep moving forward.

Eventually, we reached Bristol.

I drove him to where he needed to go. We said goodbye, he got out of my car, and I continued toward my own house.

I never saw him again.

But I have thought about him for years.

Because what stayed with me wasn’t simply that I had picked up a hitchhiker.

It was how close I came to not picking him up.

I had seen him.

I had recognized immediately that nobody was likely to stop for him.

I had felt the prompting to help him.

And still, I drove past.

Even after I turned around, I spent the entire drive back constructing a perfectly respectable theological explanation for why God surely wasn’t going to require me to actually do the thing He had told me to do.

I would be willing.

I would be obedient.

I would turn around.

But surely God wouldn’t really expect me to follow through.

And meanwhile, standing beside a gas station several miles behind me was a man praying for someone to come.

That realization disturbed me.

Because if I had ignored that prompting so easily, how many others had I ignored?

How many times had I driven past someone—literally or figuratively—because helping would have been inconvenient?

How many times had I decided something wasn’t my responsibility?

How many times had I assumed somebody else would do it?

And the question that bothered me most was one I could never answer: How many times had somebody been praying while I kept driving?

Around that time, there was a Christian song on the radio called Do Something by Matthew West. I heard it differently after that day. Its challenge was essentially the question I had just encountered on the side of a Connecticut road: If not us, then who?

I had spent plenty of time wondering why God allowed suffering and why He didn’t intervene in the lives of people who desperately needed help.

It had never occurred to me quite so forcefully that sometimes God’s answer to someone else’s prayer might be another person.

And that person might be me.

That afternoon changed something in me.

I made a promise to myself, and to God, that I have tried to carry ever since.

If God put someone in my path, and He gave me the opportunity and the means to help, I would try not to drive past again.

I haven’t always gotten that right.

Sometimes I have been tired. Sometimes afraid. Sometimes selfish. Sometimes I’ve convinced myself that someone else’s problem wasn’t mine to solve. I’m sure there have been promptings I missed entirely.

But I have never forgotten that man standing beside the road.

And I have never forgotten the order in which everything happened.

First came the instruction.

Turn around.

Then came my resistance.

Then came the obedience.

And only after I obeyed did I discover why I had been asked.

I didn’t know he was a veteran when I turned around.

I didn’t know he had overcome addiction.

I didn’t know he had been homeless.

I didn’t know he had finally gotten his own place.

I didn’t even know he was going to my town.

And I certainly didn’t know that while I was driving away from him, explaining to God all the reasons I shouldn’t turn around, he was standing there asking God to send someone.

I learned something that afternoon that would take me years to fully understand.

Sometimes God doesn’t explain where obedience is leading before He asks for it.

Sometimes He doesn’t show you the destination.

Sometimes He simply says,

Go.

And sometimes you don’t find out why until after you turn the car around.

Years passed.

There would be other moments when I felt that same unmistakable prompting. And somewhere along the way, I became less afraid of it.

Not because I became particularly brave.

And certainly not because following it always made sense.

I simply began to understand that I didn’t necessarily need to know what came afterward.

I needed to be willing to go.

Then, in 2026, our family reached a moment we had never anticipated.

St. Marys, Kansas, was supposed to be our forever home.

We had moved there in 2023 intending to stay. We put down roots quickly and deeply. We invested ourselves in the community. We built businesses. We made friends. We poured our time, our money, and ourselves into building a life around the assumption that this was where our children would grow up.

And then, quite suddenly, it became obvious that we needed to leave.

The circumstances that brought us to that decision belong, in large part, to people I love more than they belong to me, and I don’t intend to tell their stories for them.

It is enough to say that staying no longer seemed right for our family.

So we made the decision to go.

At first, the obvious thing would have been to find somewhere else.

Another town.

Another house.

Another driveway.

We could move the furniture again. Unpack the dishes again. Fill another basement, another garage, another collection of closets with the accumulated evidence of a settled American life.

We could find another place and start constructing permanence all over again.

Except something had changed.

Once we knew we were leaving, I started letting go.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

The furniture went.

The dishes went.

Clothes, books, tools, Christmas decorations, camping equipment, craft supplies, things I had packed and unpacked and hauled from one state to another because someday I might need them—all of it started leaving.

My childhood piano went.

That one hurt.

And somewhere in the middle of all that emptying, another question began to form.

What if we didn’t immediately find another place to settle?

What if we didn’t know where home was for a while?

What if, instead of rushing to reconstruct everything we had just dismantled, we simply—went?

We could take our children to the places they had read about in books.

We could stand where history happened instead of only reading about it.

We could pray in churches where generations had prayed before us. Walk the streets saints had walked. Visit shrines. Learn languages badly. Eat food we couldn’t pronounce. Meet people whose lives looked nothing like ours.

We could homeschool our children while showing them the world.

We could meet people along the way.

We could listen to their stories.

We could serve where we were useful.

We could pray for them.

And maybe, every once in a while, we could be an answer to somebody else’s prayer.

We didn’t know where all of this would lead.

We didn’t know how long we would travel.

We didn’t know where we would eventually settle, or whether somewhere along the way we would discover that our understanding of home had changed altogether.

It was impractical.

Uncertain.

Completely outside my comfort zone.

I knew that feeling.

I had felt it years before, driving away from a gas station in Connecticut.

Back then, I thought obedience meant knowing enough to understand why I was being asked to turn around.

I know better now.

Sometimes you don’t know what’s waiting when you get there.

Sometimes you don’t know who you’ll meet.

Sometimes you don’t even know exactly where you’re going.

You just know that it’s time to go.

So we sold what we could.

We gave away what we couldn’t.

We packed what remained.

We gathered our children.

And so we went.

Packing is an endeavor.

It doesn’t matter who you are or how much stuff you have. Packing is no fun.

But for me, unpacking is worse.

Because inevitably there are boxes that never get unpacked.

You know the ones.

You move into a new house and set them somewhere out of the way. The garage. The basement. The back of a closet. You’re going to unpack them, of course. Just not today. First you need to get the kitchen put together, find everyone’s sheets, and figure out which box contains the coffee maker.

Then life starts.

The box stays.

Eventually, you stop noticing it altogether.

And then you move again.

Someone picks up that same box, still taped shut from the last move, puts it on another truck, and off it goes to another house.

Do that often enough, and eventually you find yourself staring at a box you have moved five or six times without ever actually opening it.

I had boxes like that.

Quite a few of them, actually.

And this time, there would be no putting them in the basement to deal with later.

This time, I had to go through everything.

Everything.

I was tired of stuff.

And I had accumulated an extraordinary amount of experience moving it.

Moving has been a recurring theme throughout my life. I was born in Indiana, although I was too young to remember living there. Around the age of three, we moved to southern Georgia, where I lived until I was about eleven. Then came a brief stint in Florida, just across the state line, before we ultimately landed in Tennessee.

Tennessee became home for most of my growing-up years. I went to middle school there, high school there, and college there. I got married there.

There were other places sprinkled in between. After my parents divorced, my brother and I spent summers with our dad wherever he happened to be. We lived on the Memphis side of Tennessee; sometimes he was all the way over on the Knoxville side. One summer we were with him in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Another, Cincinnati, Ohio.

During college, I spent a summer working in Alaska and another working in Portland, Oregon.

Eventually, I moved to Connecticut, where my children were born. Then North Carolina. After I met my now-husband, Thomas, there was Georgia again, then South Carolina, and finally Kansas.

By the time I arrived in Kansas, I had become very good at moving.

Perhaps too good.

Because being good at moving meant I had also become very good at taking things with me.

I had hauled stuff from Georgia to Tennessee, to Connecticut, to North Carolina, back to Georgia, to South Carolina, and eventually to Kansas.

I had organized stuff.

Packed stuff.

Unpacked stuff.

Labeled stuff.

Stored stuff.

Moved stuff.

Found new places for stuff.

And then, somehow, accumulated more stuff.

I had moved out of a 5,000-square-foot house in Georgia and downsized into a smaller house in South Carolina before moving everything again to Kansas.

I had downsized homes.

I had downsized a marriage.

I had downsized childhood belongings.

And yet somehow, after all that downsizing, I still had an awful lot of stuff.

By the beginning of 2026, our family had a house, two commercial spaces, and two storage units.

All of them containing some portion of our belongings.

Which makes what happened next seem even more preposterous.

It was sometime around January of 2026, in the middle of one of those crazy workweeks that had become fairly normal for us.

Thomas and I were both self-employed, which sounds as though it should have given us tremendous freedom over our schedules. Somehow, it often had the opposite effect. We could pass each other all day long, both working, both solving problems, both answering messages, both taking care of whatever needed our immediate attention, and realize at the end of the day that we hadn’t actually had a conversation.

At least not a conversation about anything other than work.

So that day, I met him at Pilgrim’s Keep.

Pilgrim’s Keep.

I didn’t think anything of the name at the time.

It was simply where we happened to meet in the middle of a crazy week, a chance to sit across from one another for a little while and talk about something other than work.

But looking back now, knowing what would unfold over the months that followed, I find the location almost impossible to overlook.

Of all the places we could have been sitting when the first seed of this journey was planted, we were at a place called Pilgrim’s Keep.

We had no idea yet that we were going to become pilgrims.

We certainly had no idea how much we would have to leave behind in order to do it.

At that moment, we were simply a husband and wife stealing a little time together in the middle of a busy workweek.

And somewhere in the conversation, Space-A came up.

Thomas mentioned that, as a retired member of the Armed Forces, he and his dependents were eligible to fly Space Available on military flights, often for little to no cost.

I don’t remember exactly what we had been talking about that led us there.

I do remember my reaction.

Wait. What?

How had I not known this?

I knew Thomas had certain benefits as a military retiree, of course, but somehow I had missed the part where our family could potentially fly on military aircraft.

Not just somewhere nearby.

Around the world.

That changed the conversation.

Traveling with the kids had always been a dream of mine. Homeschooling and traveling, especially. In my imagination, though, it had usually looked more like an RV.

An RV seemed possible.

We could drive around the United States. We could learn history where history actually happened. We could visit national parks, museums, battlefields, monuments, and all the places that make what you read in a book suddenly become real.

We could make the road their classroom.

But international travel?

Worldschooling?

The actual world?

That had always belonged in a different category of dream.

There is a significant difference between loading five people into an RV and buying five airline tickets every time you want to cross an ocean.

But what if we didn’t have to buy those tickets?

What if we could fly Space-A around the world?

Suddenly, the map got much bigger.

What if instead of only reading about Rome, we could stand in Rome?

What if history, art, architecture, geography, religion, and culture weren’t simply subjects we studied, but places we went?

What if our children could learn about the world by actually living in it?

Thomas and I started playing with the idea.

Maybe fall 2026.

Maybe a school year.

Maybe we really could do it.

At the time, becoming pilgrims was little more than an idea tossed around during a stolen conversation in the middle of a busy workweek.

And even then, it never occurred to us that going might mean selling nearly everything we owned.

In our minds, we would travel and somehow keep the life we had built in Kansas intact while we did it.

We had five pets at the time—three dogs and two cats. We imagined we would have to figure out how to board them, place them temporarily with friends, or cobble together some combination of both for months on end.

We would still have the house.

We would still have our commercial properties.

We would still have local businesses that somehow needed to be managed from afar.

We were imagining how to leave temporarily without really leaving anything behind.

It never occurred to us that the answer might be to let most of it go.

Our actual lives looked nothing like the lives of people who could simply pick up and go.

One child was homeschooled. One was attending public school. One was attending the private academy in St. Marys.

We were trying to open Zélie’s, the art studio business we had been working toward for years.

We had another commercial lease for a clinic we planned to open.

We had our house.

And we had two storage units.

So there we were, sitting at Pilgrim’s Keep, imagining what it might be like to become a family of pilgrims while paying for five separate places to keep ourselves, our businesses, and our possessions firmly planted in Kansas.

It was a wonderful idea.

It was also completely impractical.

So we went back to work.

But the idea came with us.

Over the next few months, something interesting began to happen.

The impossible started becoming slightly less impossible.

Not because we had formulated some brilliant master plan. We hadn’t. We weren’t packing our bags or buying maps. We weren’t counting down the days until departure.

Life simply started changing.

The storage units were the first to go.

We emptied them into the clinic space, which meant that suddenly everything we had been paying to keep safely out of sight was sitting directly in front of me.

And I had to deal with it.

I sorted.

I organized.

I gave things away.

I threw things away.

And I began discovering something rather embarrassing: there were things I had considered important enough to pay money every month to store but apparently not important enough to use, look at, or even remember I owned.

The piles got smaller.

Then we made another decision.

It wasn’t the right time for the clinic.

We gave up that lease in the spring.

Two storage units and one commercial lease were gone.

We weren’t preparing to leave Kansas. Not really.

But without realizing it, some of the anchors were already coming loose.

Then summer arrived.

Financially, things became tighter.

There were things we had done for the community the year before that we simply could not afford to do again. We had to make difficult decisions in our businesses. We had to reduce staff.

The pressure kept building.

So did tension in our life in St. Marys.

It wasn’t one thing.

At least, not at first.

It was a gradual tightening.

One complication.

Then another.

One expense.

Then another.

One difficult decision followed by the next.

Things just kept getting hotter.

Looking back, there had already been multiple signs that perhaps our time in St. Marys was coming to an end. But when you aren’t ready to leave, it is remarkably easy to explain away every reason you might need to.

And we weren’t ready.

We had no idea yet what God would ultimately ask of us, or how painful the answer would be.

So the room kept getting hotter.

And hotter.

Until eventually you stop asking how to make the room comfortable again and finally notice the door that has been standing open.

Maybe God opened it long before you realized it was time to walk through.

And then something happened.

It is not my story to tell, so I will not tell it here.

I have learned that something can profoundly affect your own life without therefore becoming your story to share. This is one of those things.

What matters here is what it changed for us.

Suddenly, staying in St. Marys no longer seemed possible.

And the crazy idea Thomas and I had talked about months earlier at Pilgrim’s Keep wasn’t a crazy idea anymore.

It was an exit.

The conversation changed almost overnight from:

Could we really do this?

to:

We’re doing this.

And only then did we begin to understand that walking through that open door was going to require much more than buying backpacks and figuring out a school curriculum.

We weren’t being asked merely to take a trip.

We were being asked to leap.

From the time we made that realization until the time we actually left was about five weeks.

Five weeks.

Five weeks to dismantle a life.

And that was when I looked around and realized just how much life there was to dismantle.

Zélie’s alone was full.

We had spent three years trying to bring it to life. Three years of ideas, purchases, plans, furniture, equipment, art supplies, craft supplies, decorations, fixtures, tables, chairs, and all the little things you accumulate when you’re building something you expect to exist for years.

Now it all had to go.

So did most of what was in our house.

And the five pets we had once imagined somehow boarding for months on end needed homes of their own.

Thomas and I gave ourselves one rule:

Whatever our family of five kept had to fit into one U-Haul trailer behind our Jeep Wagoneer.

Five people.

One trailer.

That was when packing became something entirely different.

This wasn’t packing for another move.

There wasn’t another house waiting for us at the other end where I could recreate the same rooms with the same furniture and put the same boxes in another basement.

We didn’t even know exactly where all of this would take us.

We were trying to make ourselves mobile.

And mobility and stuff do not coexist particularly well.

So we started going through it.

All of it.

This was not downsizing.

This was an excavation.

We held sales at Zélie’s.

Then more sales.

People came through and carried away furniture, supplies, equipment, decorations, household goods, and pieces of a life we had expected to continue living.

We donated things.

We gave things away.

We threw things away.

And then we went home and did it again.

Closet by closet.

Drawer by drawer.

Box by box.

Keep.

Sell.

Donate.

Trash.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I quickly discovered that the popular decluttering question—Does this bring me joy?—was absolutely useless to me.

Yes.

It brings me joy.

That’s why I bought it.

Will I ever use this again?

Probably.

Maybe.

Someday.

Also useless.

I am an adult with ADHD. Starting projects I don’t finish is something of a specialty of mine. I’m quite good at it. I would go so far as to call it one of my many talents.

And now I had the archaeological evidence.

There were craft projects I had started twenty years earlier.

Fabric for things I was definitely going to sew.

Supplies for hobbies I was absolutely going to resume.

Half-finished projects I had faithfully transported across multiple states.

Some of my unfinished craft projects had traveled more extensively than many Americans.

And somehow, every time I had encountered them before, I had thought:

Someday.

This time, someday wasn’t good enough.

I needed a different question.

Am I willing to carry this where I am going?

That changed everything.

Because every object suddenly had a cost beyond what I had paid for it.

It required space.

It required a box.

It required someone to carry the box.

It required room in the trailer.

And wherever we eventually landed, it would require us to continue being responsible for it.

That was when I realized something I probably should have figured out years earlier:

I did not have to be the permanent caretaker of every object I had ever acquired.

I could let it go.

Even if it was useful.

Even if it was beautiful.

Even if I had paid good money for it.

Even if I might conceivably need it again someday.

Even if I liked it.

Someone else could like it.

Someone else could use it.

Someone else could finish the project I hadn’t touched in twenty years.

Let it be someone else’s new beginning.

And once I understood that, the process became strangely liberating.

I was tired of stuff.

I was tired of organizing it, packing it, unpacking it, labeling it, storing it, moving it, finding new places for it, and then somehow acquiring more of it.

At one point, my son stood there wearing just a fraction of the hats I was getting rid of.

Hats.

So many hats.

Apparently, at some point, I had decided one household needed enough hats to outfit a small baseball league.

And that was only the hats.

There were Christmas decorations and kitchen gadgets and clothes and books and camping equipment and furniture and craft supplies and tools and bins and boxes and things whose purpose I could no longer identify but had nevertheless carefully transported across state lines.

I was done.

I was entering a phase of life where I simply wasn’t interested in keeping things unless they had significant, meaningful value to me.

That did not mean becoming a person with no possessions.

There were things I wasn’t willing to give up.

My great-grandmother painstakingly sewed clothes for my Barbie dolls—tiny dresses with little buttons and bows and details that somebody making mass-produced doll clothes would never bother with.

Those stay.

Heirloom childhood Christmas ornaments that transport me backward in time every year when I unwrap them?

Keep.

Certain clothes that belonged to my children.

Keep.

Yearbooks. Nobody wants somebody else’s used, written-in high school yearbook anyway, but those are part of my history.

Keep.

Newspaper clippings. Photographs. Letters. Degrees. Diplomas. Things that preserve a person, a place, an accomplishment, or a moment that cannot be recreated.

Keep.

The distinction became clearer.

I didn’t need to keep everything from my past in order to keep my past.

Some things tell the story of your life.

Other things merely accompanied you through it.

I could let those things go.

For me, that realization felt like freedom.

For the children, it was different.

I had something they didn’t have.

Time.

Some of the things I was getting rid of had been following me around for ten, twenty, thirty, maybe forty years. I had had decades to determine whether they mattered.

The kids hadn’t.

Their entire lives were shorter than the amount of time I had owned some of the things I was casually dropping into a donation box.

To them, possessions could be more than possessions.

They were attachment.

Security.

Sentiment.

Evidence of a childhood they were still living.

How do you explain to a child that something that feels incredibly important now may not feel important ten years from now?

You can’t.

Not really.

You can tell them what you’re trading it for.

We’re going to travel the world.

We’re going to see the places you’ve read about.

We’re going to walk through museums and churches and ancient cities.

We’re going to experience history instead of only studying it.

We’re going to collect experiences instead of objects.

But you cannot ask a sixteen-year-old to possess the perspective of a forty-eight-year-old.

And it wasn’t only their belongings they were giving up.

Our children were sixteen, fifteen, and thirteen when we began this journey.

Three teenagers.

Three teenagers willing to step away from a very ordinary American adolescence.

Friends.

Band.

Homecomings.

Proms.

Their own high school yearbooks.

The familiar rhythm of a school year.

Summers that looked like everyone else’s summers.

Knowing where they lived.

Knowing where they would probably live next month.

They were giving up a version of adolescence.

That was not insignificant.

And I never wanted to pretend that because what we were gaining was extraordinary, what they were losing didn’t matter.

It did.

This wasn’t something Thomas and I simply announced one night at dinner:

Surprise! We’re selling everything and leaving the country.

We decided this as a family.

We talked about it.

We imagined it.

We weighed what we would lose against what we might gain.

All five of us agreed to go.

But agreeing to a sacrifice doesn’t make it cease to be a sacrifice.

So when it came to their belongings, we needed something more concrete than Does it bring you joy?

We asked another question:

Is it truly irreplaceable?

Because most practical things could be replaced.

A coat can be replaced.

Shoes can be replaced.

A kitchen appliance can be replaced.

If we discovered six months later that we had made some terrible mistake by giving away a camping gadget, there was a reasonably good chance somebody somewhere would sell us another camping gadget.

We were blessed. We had income.

Things could be replaced.

Memories couldn’t.

So they kept the things that mattered in that way.

Pictures.

Certain posters.

Letters.

Mementos.

Little objects that might look worthless to somebody else but carried a particular memory for them.

The sorts of things that, over a lifetime, might fill a couple of scrapbooks.

Because we weren’t trying to erase our history.

We were trying to make it portable.

And slowly, somehow, it was working.

The piles shrank.

The shelves emptied.

Furniture disappeared through the doors at Zélie’s.

People drove away with things we had once carefully selected for a future that was no longer going to happen.

And there was sadness in that.

Of course there was.

But there was also something else.

Freedom.

The storage units were gone.

The clinic was gone.

Zélie’s was emptying.

The house was emptying.

Every day, there was less.

Less to store.

Less to maintain.

Less to organize.

Less to move.

Less tying us to one particular patch of earth.

For years, I had thought freedom meant having enough.

Enough money.

Enough space.

Enough security.

Enough stuff.

Now I was beginning to wonder whether freedom might have something to do with needing less.

Still, five weeks is not a lot of time to dismantle a life.

There were days when it felt completely absurd.

We would load a vehicle with donations, come back, look around, and somehow the building still looked full.

We would sell furniture all day and discover another room of things that needed decisions.

We would empty closets at home only to find another cabinet, another drawer, another box.

And the boxes were the worst.

Because some of them I recognized.

I had seen them before.

Georgia.

South Carolina.

Maybe even before that.

Boxes I had carried from one version of my life into another without ever opening them.

There was nowhere to hide them now.

No basement.

No garage.

No storage unit.

No next house.

So I cut the tape.

And I opened them.

One by one.

Things I had once believed I needed.

Things I had forgotten existed.

Things I had spent money to move and money to store.

Things that had followed me for years without actually being part of my life at all.

Every object had to answer the same question:

Are you coming with us?

Most of them weren’t.

And for once, I wasn’t going to carry the past with me simply because I had carried it this far.

Maybe that was what all of this was really about.

Months earlier, Thomas and I had stolen a little time together in the middle of a workweek and sat at Pilgrim’s Keep imagining what it might be like to take our children into the world.

At the time, I thought the difficult part would be figuring out how to get there.

Which military flight?

Which country?

Where would we sleep?

How would we teach the kids?

How long could we stay?

I hadn’t understood yet that before we could go anywhere, we had to learn how to leave.

Leaving a place was one thing.

Leaving the life you thought you were building there was another.

Leaving the objects you had dragged from one chapter of your life into the next was another still.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

I had always liked that line.

Now I was living it.

The clinic had ended.

Zélie’s was ending.

Our time in St. Marys was ending.

The version of childhood our children had expected was ending.

And scattered across our floors, tables, closets, and boxes were thousands of tiny decisions about what else would end with it.

But endings make room.

That was what I was beginning to understand.

Sometimes making room for what comes next means finally being willing to let go of what came before.

We thought we were packing to leave Kansas.

We were doing something much bigger.

We were learning how to become pilgrims.

And pilgrims cannot carry everything.