Date: 2023-07-21
From: Standing Bear Farm

To: Home
Miles today: 0.0

Day 27 - Bringing Home some Trail MagicToday is our final zero day. One journey is ending but another is just beginning. We¢re sitting in our van in the town of Hot Springs, NC waiting out a rainstorm and hoping to go white water rafting. The younger kids are running around a field getting soaking wet.  Ironic that we made it 250 miles without hiking in the rain but it¢s now catching up with us. Erin and I have been reflecting a lot and discussing with the kids what we¢ve learned on this trip. Our biggest fear is that the opportunity be wasted and we let important lessons slip by unlearned. what if our kids return home and fight, argue or complain just the same? We don¢t expect a simple walk through the woods to work miracles but hopefully it did something, right?We¢ve talked with the kids about gratefulness and working hard (gratitude and grit) and those terms have a lot more meaning to us now. But what else can we take away from our long walk?We may have seen a hint at the answer today. If I had to name the most unexpected aspect of this trip for us (the ¢So Dang Sweet¢ family) it¢s been relationship. Neither Erin nor I had any idea we would be forming relationships along the way. We thought of this as a mostly insular family experience. We thought we¢d grow individually and as a family unit but that¢s it. We have been truly moved by the friendships forged along the way. Our oldest son said it well yesterday when he shared what he¢s learned on the trip. He said ¢I learned you become a lot better friends with people when you go through hard things together¢.  He¢s absolutely correct. Shared suffering builds strong bonds. We have felt on this trip that we have been the beneficiaries of so much love and kindness from others. It has felt very unbalanced, as if we¢re not giving enough but always receiving. Maybe we can¢t always see the ways we¢ve helped, encouraged or inspired others but it sure feels like we could do more. One person our paths have converged with is ¢Bones¢. He graduated college the same year as Erin and I, summer of 2001. He came to hike the trail that year and made it half way. 22 years and some hard times and broken dreams later, he¢s back to finish. The Lord saw fit to bring our paths together and we¢ve leapfrogged each other many times in the last couple of weeks.  Yesterday Bones was at the hostel when we arrived, crossing our own finish line. We got to hang out with him a bit more and then he pushed off in the late afternoon for the trail again. Before he left we gathered all of our unused supply boxes out of the car and let Bones sort through it and we built a resupply box for him that we promised to deliver to the next town, a three days hike away. That¢s where we are now. We just dropped it off at the hostel he¢ll come to. We all wrote him a note and put it in the box. After he hiked away last night Erin found a scrap of paper on our bed with a pencil drawing on it. A drawing of our family.  Bones is an artist. Somewhere he had drawn a scene of our family that captured each one of us perfectly. It will be a cherished momento from our journey.  He had left this for us even before we resupplied him with food.  Even when we thought we were doing good for him, we were already indebted to him for a gift we hadn¢t found yet. As we left the package at the hostel a short while ago, there I was standing in the rain with our middle son as we closed the tape on the box. It felt so exciting and so good to think of blessing someone else. All this time on the trail, hiking our hike and wondering what lessons we¢ve learned simply brought us back to one of the greatest and simplest truths we¢ve known but often have forgotten. Thinking of and doing for others ALWAYS brings you more joy than thinking of yourself. As we prepare to head home we are different than when we began. Im reminded of our day 1 start. As we prepared to walk out of the lodge doors I stopped the kids and warned them.  I said once they passed through those doors and stepped onto the trail, they would never be the same people again.  Those words were true, I just couldn¢t have guessed what the changes would look like. Now we know. Having suffered, we are more understanding of other¢s suffering; having gone without, more grateful for what we have; having wandered so far, more willing to help others find their way and having been so often loved and shown kindness, more eager than ever to love others. For the Thomson family, the journey can be summed up in three words -SO DANG SWEET!Signing off for the last time¢¦ for now.