At the foot of the cross

I ask for your prayers. The arch of my left foot has been hurting for the past two weeks. It's usually a dull ache but once it was an acute pain. It fills me with concern and anxiety as I depart today for my pilgrimage.

My aches may be making me feel down, but I am confident that it won't hold me back. Something has been calling me to the foot of the cross for too long -- drawing me to love unlimited, to care for others always - to allow this to just stop my pilgrimage.

Instead, the journey might be changed.

The journey might be massaged and morphed and mutated into something that wasn't conceived in my imagination and original plans.

The journey might become less; and, it might become more.

From the many lessons that arose from my last Camino, and from prayerful discernment, I've come around to understanding the need to give up the need to control my journey. Father Richard Rohr has stated that the opposite of love is not doubt; the opposite of love is control. I've spent far too much time controlling my path instead of allowing God's plans and routes to unfold.

So I will try to not let the instinct-to-control own me. I will be intentional in diminishing the fear it wants to create in me. And the way to do so is to let that instinct free. Let it float away. Accepting the plans of the Holy Spirit is so much more difficult than I imagined, yet it also is so much more liberating than I imagined.

And allowing Her to show me a different way may mean revealing my own hurts and pains first. Again, this will be ok. For whether or not I have disappointments in coping with these limitations placed by my body and mind, I should try to yield and accept changes to purely man-made facades. For these man-made edifices were built by me. They might have been inspired by my love of Christ, molded by experience with others, tempered by flawed relationships, but they are mine and not God's plans for me. I don't have some hotline to know what Her plans truly are so I must listen and listen well.

So yield I must try. And pray I will. And if you, as I begin this pilgrimage, walk and yield, pray and walk with me, then I truly will be on a pilgrimage with God beside me. And as we make our away along the foot of the cross, we can carry each other along to places that feed us deeply.

Buen camino, peregrino.