An "Ah-ha" Moment

15 October 1996

I have had this particular date on my mind for a few weeks now. My wife and I woke up that morning in Arquata Scrivia, Italy. Arquata Scrivia is a small town in the Province of Genoa, about 34 miles north of Genoa. We had fallen asleep the night before with a light drizzle of rain falling and woke up with the same light drizzle. If only it had stayed that way.

We were in Italy on a prayer walk. This walk, the Reconciliation Walk, was the outreach of our missions training class. For us, the walk began in Dijon, France on September 23rd and ended in Bari, Italy on November 24th. We covered a distance of 1,020 miles crossing the Jura Mountains, the Alps at Saint Bernard Pass and the Apennines. But we didn’t walk every mile. A good many of them yes. But not every one.

This is what we were doing in this small, obscure town in Northern Italy on this damp morning. We had our breakfast, packed our gear and set out. 

The drizzle became heavier as the first hours passed and finally gave way to a steady rainfall that accompanied us through the day. It would lighten up at times and become heavier at times. Light or heavy, it was raining all the time. About that day, I noted in my journal that “even the inside of my coat was getting wet. My sweater and undershirt were getting wet around the neckline and I could sense the wetness creeping higher up my legs. There was no keeping the rain out.” It was a rain that would eventually soak me, and everyone else, thoroughly. 

It was also becoming colder. About the only thing that would keep you warm was to keep walking. Normally we would take turns having a break from walking as a day would progress. But not this day. Walking fought back the chill.

In time, we made it into Genoa and found a small church where we would spend the night. There wasn’t much room, but enough to have a place to change and get dry, to cook a warm meal and to drop my pack and spread my sleeping bag. I laid down pulled out my journal to write. Gerrie was beside me, laying on her sleeping bag, reading. 

“Another revelation of today is the appreciation of dry socks, shoes and cloths. Also having a dry place to lay your head. This whole day, and other events and locations we have rested for the day have taught me the appreciation of the simple pleasures of this life. So often we chase after so much comfort feeling that they are the necessities of life. But when it comes down to it, we all need few things than we think.

“Laying here in my sleeping bag I have just come to understand that all I really felt was needed for this two months, is under my head. It is a nice understanding. True, if I were settled somewhere, which I will be sometime in the near future, I would like my books and music. But I know that it doesn’t take all these things to live. They are add-ons that can make a life more enjoyable, but they are not needed to live. I am beginning to understand more about the teaching the Jesus in Matthew 6:25-34. He will provide.”

This was one of those quintessential moments in life. An “ah-ha” moment when you catch a glimpse of something bigger than yourself. It was a moment in time when I could pause and truly say that I was happy in that moment.

Life is full of distractions. We race around doing all in our power to achieve, to acquire, to accumulate all the things that we were told “makes life worth living.” As Tom Hodgkinson writes in the preface of his book, How To Be Idle, “In the West, we have become addicted to work. Americans now work the longest hours in the world. And the result is not health, wealth and wisdom, but rather a lot of anxiety, a lot of ill health and a lot of debt.”

When Gerrie and I returned from foreign missions, this is world we returned to. It is not the world of our creating, but the world of our necessity. It is the world that demands a quickened pace simply to keep up. It is a world that chips away at dreams and says that you can’t do something. You can’t do the thing you want to do because it takes time that you do not have. It takes time that you should be working, achieving, acquiring and accumulating. 

But this is not the life I want. Is is not that life we want. So I dream. We dream. We dream about “one of these days” and wonder if we might be able to manage one or two them. We dream about striking out on an adventure again where the experience, or the lesson from the experience, is gained. We long for those “ah-ha” moments again where we are given a glimpse of something grand. Something spectacular!

Many moments in life are meant to happen only once. Yet still, there are moments that I wish for, that I dream for, to happen again. I pray that someday I'll have a moment again, like that evening in Italy, when I realize that what I have with me, is all that I need. That I am at peace in a moment. Living simply and simply living.

Gerrie and I don’t know what it is, or when it will come. We don’t know where we will be. It could be right here at home for all we know. But we know that something is ahead of us. We know that before we close our eyes for the last time, that there is still a time for us. A time when we will say, “this is what it is all about. This is our life. This is profound. This is God!“