Why I Keep Walking

Over the years the people who know me the best still sometimes comment on the sadness I carry behind my eyes, a quiet grief that never quite leaves.

I think it’s because I spent so many of those years standing at gravesides, burying children whose lives were cut tragically short, cradling children orphaned by AIDS in South India, and carrying the bodies of the dying out of Mother Teresa’s centers in Calcutta. You don’t walk away from that untouched. You don’t witness that much suffering and come home with an unscarred soul.

I was tear-gassed in Cusco. Robbed in Phnom Penh. Once I arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the middle of the night with no hotel reservation and no one waiting. I’ve been stranded in the Himalayan mountains behind a twenty-foot rockslide on a one-lane road. I had guns pressed into my chest in Jerusalem. I stayed awake all night in terror in Freetown while rebel soldiers roamed the streets during Sierra Leone’s civil war. I learned the sound of fear in dozens of languages. I learned the weight of desperation. I learned how thin the line is between safety and catastrophe, between privilege and survival.

Suffering stopped being abstract. It had a face. A name. A story.

And so did courage.

I watched mothers share their last bowl of rice with a stranger. I watched communities rebuild after their homes were burned to the ground. I watched children who had lost everything still find reasons to laugh. I witnessed faith that refused to die, hope that refused to surrender, and love that kept showing up long after logic said it shouldn’t.

Those years broke me open. They rearranged my soul. They taught me the world is far more fragile than we pretend and far more sacred than we realize.

I didn’t know it then, but I was being apprenticed into pilgrimage.