Our Journey Continues

As the weather has turned warmer and the rains temporarily abated, I have begun taking walks again outdoors. Recently I went to Beavers Bend Park here in Frisco to try out the walking trail. I thought the park looked vaguely familiar although I hadn’t been there since moving to Frisco last September. As I started out on the trail I began to remember that my wife Mary and I had walked here before some years ago following a visit to our daughter and son-in-law’s Frisco home while we were still living in Plano. As I neared the top of a hill I recognized the place where Mary had said she was tired and wanted to return down the path we had come up.

Mary and I had an exciting journey together for over 54 years as we documented in our book, “Spiritual Entrepreneurship”. We both had a passion for travel and adventure and we took advantage of the opportunities we had to pursue that passion. As a result we were able to  engage in successful careers in several different industries (manufacturing, construction commercial real estate, telecommunications, marketing consulting and academia) and in the process to live in several different communities in Texas, Louisiana and Virginia. During that time we were able to go places and do things that went far beyond what we had originally expected for ourselves. We indulged our passion for travel by visiting all 50 of the United States and over 60 foreign countries, experiencing wondrous sights, sounds, smells and tastes and learning something about how people live, work, play and worship in those different places. I am forever grateful that we took advantage of the opportunities we had while we were able to.

While at home we often went for walks that not only provided some exercise, but also gave us time to be together in a relatively quiet and peaceful setting and to talk at length about our plans and hopes for the future. In recent years Mary’s deteriorating health had curtailed, but not totally stopped, our opportunities to travel. Our last overseas trip was to Italy for a second time in 2012. Our domestic travel, however, continued through a trip to Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida in May of 2017. A planned trip to New York for September 2017 had to be cancelled due to our move to a new home in Frisco that month. Our walks also had been shortened, but not abandoned altogether.

After Mary passed away last December it took me a while to get back to a regimen of walking. And when I did most of it was indoors due to the weather. When I did venture outdoors again I started slowly, taking short walks around our new neighborhood. These brought back bittersweet memories, and I felt a deep sense of loneliness. Then when I returned to Beavers Bend Park and reached that former turning back point on the trail, I determined to go on alone this time to see what lay ahead that Mary and I had not seen in our earlier walk. I felt it was my duty somehow to forge on ahead alone. This time I made a more complete loop around part of the park and encountered some new sights. It was with more of a sense of resignation than of joy, however.

Today though, God awoke me to a new realization, one I had arrived at earlier, but had forgotten. Mary is no longer by my side to share the journey in the way she did for so many years. But she still lives in my heart, so she goes with me still nonetheless. And then I realized that I have the opportunity now to take her with me to places we had dreamed of, but not yet visited. I can take her with me to places that her tiring mortal body no longer allowed. With that in mind, I went back to Beavers Bend Park today and started out on the trail. This time I told Mary that we were going to places she had not yet been and see things she had not yet seen. And when I turned a bend  in a new section of the trail I was confronted with a path that stretched as far as I could see. “Wow’, I thought, “This path goes on forever”. And then it hit me straight between the eyes: The journey we are on does go on forever. The end of this mortal life marks the beginning of an eternal, immortal one. And one day in the not too distant future, I will once again continue my journey with Mary at my side, as well as my parents, grandparents and all those who have gone on before me. What a glorious thought!

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