Crossing the Great Divide

SOMEWHERE IN IDAHO – Last year’s trip was a lot of fun. This time around, not so much. Last year, the journey truly was every bit as enjoyable as the individual destinations. This time, it has seemed more like work.

Part of this has been the difference between traveling in an RV versus a car. You can’t help but feel connected with the places you pass in an RV. You see it better from the huge big screen TV that is the windshield, a wider and much higher viewpoint than granted by mere cars.

There is also the community of camping, such as it is in the RV universe. You meet your neighbors and conversation seems so much easier than what might come in fleeting moments in and out of hotel chambers. And of course, no lugging luggage in and out of the nightly pitstops.

To be sure, driving the RV was exhausting. But even that lent itself to the adventure. Epics should be hard.

All these things are true, but I don’t think they are the real TRUTH of why I have been enjoying this trip so much less. This trip is hard because of what and who are leaving behind.

But again, as with most things worthwhile, there should be some hardship, some pain.
This of course, is the beginning of a much larger epic for us. But I guess what this trip has felt like is that strange twilight that separates the end of night and the dawn of a new day. The sun isn’t quite up yet, but the light is gathering.

It is a limbo between yesterday and tomorrow where today doesn’t quite seem to exist, a place where home is both what is behind and what it before. Usually, Marley and I spend most of our time in travel deep in conversation. Early on in this trip, though, we acknowledged that wasn’t happening. We saw our need to grieve our sense of loss in leaving Ohio quietly, together but alone.

Only the day before, we would learn last night during dinner, more than a foot of snow had fallen on these roads. Indeed, we had entered the snowline repeatedly throughout the day. And although the skies were windy and cold with scattered clouds, the roads were clear and the sun shined brightly. It was the kind of day that feels not quite like winter, but not quite like spring, either.

But something significant began to change yesterday as we made our way though the deep valleys and high mountain passes of Montana. At some point in the afternoon, I saw a brief flash of roadside sign that said:

You are now crossing the Continental Divide
Elevation: 6963 feet

It is the place from which all water, instead of moving east back towards the Atlantic, begins a journey that will end eventually in the Pacific. It is, as I think it put it last year, the tipping point. Without even thinking about it I called Marley’s brother Chris to announce we were on the downhill slope of our journey.

And then something important happened. Marley and I began to talk. We talked about what we had learned in our three years in New Knoxville and how God had worked and moved in our lives in ways that were so unexpected. And as we made our way into Missoula, where we would bed down for the night, we began exploring what this new chapter of our lives might look like. We asked ourselves what our prayer should be for this season we will eventually call our years at Mars Hill.

Rather than build a list of demands that we might present before God, we searched for how our hearts might be changed according to his will, to be open to the unexpected and maybe even the unwanted. We found ourselves dwelling on the word “effective” – the ways that we might be more effective parents, spouses, students, and servants – but ultimately, I think, how we can most effectively love God, ourselves and those around us.

For me, I think that means learning how to be a better doer, really embracing the idea that without action, without work, my faith is dead. I want to find ways where I can meaningfully live out the idea that Christ really does have no hand but our hands.

Just before we left Ohio, I met a guy that has given me a glimpse of what that looks like. David and I share some common threads in our respective stories. We’re both about the same age, both Army veterans, both parents of the most beautiful children ever born and both married to the loves our lives.

But where I have long yearned to find a way to help others in way that was practical and meaningful, Dave just went and out did it. Indeed, my vision has always been volunteering in a place where hungry people could get fed. So was David’s. And for awhile he traveled long hours to work in missions for the homeless far from his home in Sidney, Ohio.

Then he found out there were homeless in Sidney, but no missions to help feed them. So he just started his own ministry. You can read about it here and check out his personal blog here. What I admire about David is that he just did it. He didn’t wring his hands or bitch about what wasn’t, he just saw a need and filled it. Now several churches in Sidney have partnered with him and real people in real need are finding some help and some compassion during a time in their lives when both have been in short supply.

This is a video that shows the work that he and his friends do every Saturday.


Dave’s motivation, as best I can tell, is not to win cool points with God. He’s not trying to do good deeds so that he can build a line of credit in his cosmic bank account.

He is simply, clearly, loving because he has been loved. He is working out his faith, that is to say, he is giving it a work out. In short, he’s the kind of guy I want to be more like.

He's one of the many reasons it is so hard to leave home. Meanwhile, however, we're happy to report we should be arriving home sometime this evening. It's been a hard trip, but a good one.