Denver, Colorado.

As we hit a rest in our journey, I feel an urge to reflect on what’s happening inside me; the overarching forces that brought me here and the forces playing on me through this trip.  How did I get here?  What convinced me to get a bike and ride it all summer across the country to support a cause that works for people I’ve never met in a country I’ve never seen?  Why did I choose to take on this challenge, of all the things I could have done– a sense of adventure?  Determination to do something different?  Pride?  Guilt?  Faith?
And now that I’m here, riding under new skies everyday and shaking hands with people I will never see again, what’s happening to me?  What is this experience doing to my body and my mind, and what can I do with that change?

I came into the world with a malleable mind, susceptible to any influence near, and I grew up as an outsider, unable to ever find myself inside anything that felt like a community.  Children are passionately concerned with being accepted by their peers, and as a homeschooled kid in Texas I was no different.  But I was different in that while other kids my age seemed to have no trouble clicking into place with each other, I was unable to do that.  Not due to lack of desire or effort on my part, but due to a frustrating, confusing lack of basic knowledge, I just couldn’t make it work.  I say this not as an appeal for sympathy, not at all, but in an effort to understand and explain– a young isolation gave me open eyes and an outsider’s perspective, and along with other factors, it kept me from ever being fully content with life as I found it.

I was comfortable, but never satisfied.  I knew the money my dad made didn’t make us happy, and I knew there must be something more.  Balances started to shift in my mind– I decided that people must be important, they must be the only important thing, and I decided that the American dream was not for me.  I became enchanted by (and still am) the idea of living under income level, as a sly punch to the irony of our luxury, misery, and debt.  I read about global poverty and how 50% of our world lives on less than $2 a day, and I walked around my house feeling shamefully rich with a twenty dollar bill in my pocket.  I hitchhiked across Michigan.  I felt the stirrings of a compassion for the homeless, war-affected, displaced, orphans, and the victims of a crabbed and crooked global economic system, and I felt a fear that this compassion for a nameless faceless shapeless mass was far too fragile, that it could easily die if I did nothing to take action.

And I did nothing to take action.  I never met the people I had read about, and those first stirrings of compassion started decomposing into a desensitized apathy.  I watched it happening, and I was frustrated as I watched; frustrated and falling asleep.  The fences between me and that half of the world were too tall, so I laid down at the bottom of the fence and the fear of being part of something bigger than myself, that fear knocked me into a paralyzed sleep.

That fear of being part of something bigger than me– whether born of pride, or a faulty concept of independence, or a realistic mistrust, or just good ol’ fashioned cynicism– that fear made me cautious of every organized effort to bring a positive change to the world, whether it was a mission trip, a political movement, or some organization like Invisible Children or Falling Whistles.  Reflecting on it now, I think that fear is made up of both good and rotten parts, both realism and despair.  But when the opportunity to commit myself to this crazy trip for Falling Whistles came up a few months ago, my old frustration at my lack of action was strong enough to crush the whole thing when it would say, “it’s not worth it, it won’t change anything”.

Now what’s happening to me?  With a month left in this ride of a lifetime, I can already see the changes in me.  Little ones, like the tan lines my fingerless gloves leave and the developing muscles in my legs, and bigger ones.
I can ride my bike for 11 hours a day with no other activity.  I’m surprised that I can find that kind of sustained focus for something that is so unchanging.
I’m learning new ways to approach what I always saw as a dichotomy between community and privacy.  Living 24/7 with the same four guys lays demands on me that I’ve never had before, and the life we’re living demands that we work together more than I was prepared for.  I’m learning to live healthily without my habitual solitude and time to read and to rest alone.

All of that, but I think the biggest change I’m feeling was epitomized last night at the Unreasonable Mansion.  I am beginning to believe in the possibility, maybe even the inevitability, of positive change.  The Unreasonables (along with so many other people we’ve met along the way) know how to live well, and they know how to work to bring freedom and make peace.  Being a witness to these beautiful ways of life convinces me that anyone can create their own, even me.  We set out on this trip to educate and inspire people, but more and more I find that I am the one being educated and inspired.  I am being granted the incredible privilege of witnessing a growing coalition of people who will ask the hard questions and take on the hard jobs, the people who are engaged not in talking about the world but in changing it.  May I live in such a way as to honor what I’ve seen.

If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

– Lao Tzu (570-490 B.C.)

Thanks for listening.

-Andrew

to hear more from the boys, check out their personal blog.