God Has a Way Prepared
For my entire life, I’ve wished I could be a foreign exchange student in Europe, travelling by train, staying in Hostels, attending Cambridge. Or perhaps walking across America for National Geographic, documenting my experiences, recording the stories of the people I met, stopping to work at day jobs to get the cash to keep walking. Maybe jumping into empty boxcars, eating beans cold out of a tin can, dodging the rail employees and playing chess or checkers with local folks in coffeehouses in Smalltown, America. Those were my ways of accomplishing something with my life. But, “for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.” (Is. 55:8)
Now, it will happen.
How Walking Became Possible
This adventure started when I wrecked my car on October 19, 2021.
I was driving on a two-lane city street in a residential area, doing about 25 mph in a 30-mph zone, following half a dozen cars. Something caught my eye in the mirror, and I glanced up at looked to see what it was. While I checked the mirror, the car in the lead stopped to wait for oncoming traffic in order to make a left turn into a church’s parking lot.
By the time I looked forward, it was too late to avoid a catastrophe. Cranking the steering wheel as hard to the right as I could, I jumped the curb, missed the car in front of me, ran over and destroyed a mailbox, and came to a sudden jolting stop.
Thanks for the Accident
The first thing I did was to bow my head and pray.
“Thank you, God, for blessing me with this accident. I don’t know why it needed to happen, but I trust that it somehow furthers your plan for my life, and for that, I’m grateful. Amen.”
Where does a prayer like that, amid a common crisis of our modern lifestyle, come from? In my experience, if a thought comes to me that I would otherwise never think, I’ve learned that I’m hearing the voice of God speak to me. I often recall something profound I once read.
Worry is blind and cannot discern the future, but Jesus sees the end from the beginning. In every difficulty he has his way prepared to bring relief. Our heavenly Father has a thousand ways to provide for us of which we know nothing. Those who accept the one principle of making the service and honor of God supreme will find perplexities vanish and a plain path before their feet.
This certainly had to be one of those thousand ways of which I know nothing! What had God prepared this accident to bring relief from?
Accident Aftermath
The accident seemed fairly mundane on the surface. Although I couldn’t stop in time, the accident involved no one else. There was some property damage, but I was unhurt and except for the radiator pressing against the engine block, there was very little in the way of visible evidence that the car had suffered damage.
When I took it to a body shop, the mechanic walked around the car and took notes of what he saw. He didn’t take very many notes. At the end of the cursory examination, when we went back inside to draw up the paperwork, I said, “Get the car up into the air and look again. All the force of impact went under the car with the mailbox. I think you will find quite a bit of damage to the undercarriage.”
Did he ever find damage!
A Thousand Ways to…
Provide Finances
He estimated $7,000 in damage that he could see and said, “There is an extremely high likelihood of considerably more damage to the frame once I remove the visible damage.” The next day, the insurance adjuster called to confirm the mechanic’s suspicions. They were going to write off the car as a total loss. He asked me how much I owed on it. The instant he asked that question, another one of those thoughts that I would never in seven lifetimes think popped into my head and came out my mouth.
“I don’t think I’m going to replace it — or repair it, either. Perhaps it is time for me to be willing to give up the convenience of driving. I retired, so I no longer need that kind of freedom of movement.”
Surprised, the adjuster had to ask me to confirm that he understood what I had just said. When I did, he said, “OK, then. We’ll just send you the check for $10,000 and you can pay off the loan and we’ll deal with disposing of your car.”
After the conversation, I checked on my outstanding balance on the loan. I owed just over $6,000 so I used the rest of the money to pay off two credit cards. That is how, since November, I haven’t paid car payments, insurance, gas, wear-and-tear, and two credit card “minimum due” payments.
Provide Socially
For three years, I had been living in an apartment in Dalton, Georgia. The woman who lived in the apartment above mine had come to my door once asking if she could make a call on my phone. She seemed aloof, distant, maybe quietly desperate or depressed. I didn’t know it at the time but letting her use my phone became the beginning of three years of trying to help her, trying to live, act, anticipate, and offer help the way Jesus had done for so many in the three years of His ministry. In those three years, she had tried my patience and abused my willingness to be there for her.
Over those years, I learned about her addictions to street drugs and sex. She wasn’t a sex worker, but it was often on her mind and in her conversation. I spoke to her about my love for Jesus and His love for me. She seemed receptive to the subject, but not to my lifestyle. Over the three years, I became resigned to the fact that she was just using me and that I was not meeting her true needs. I asked God on a number of occasions to give me enough of His love and strength to enable me to stay the course with her.
A few days after the accident, my neighbor came down to ask me to drive her somewhere. I told her about the accident and my decision to not replace the car. Apparently, she found someone else to mooch from because that was the last time we spoke.
Provide for Family
Regulatory Crisis
My daughter’s first husband died in a single-engine plane crash but before he died, he gave her two children. Her second husband gave her five more children.
In August of 2021, when the first two children left the nest, her first-born daughter reported her stepfather to Child Protection Services (CPS). This put my daughter in a sticky situation. CPS sent a social worker to investigate, and the social worker determined that my son-in-law used abusive disciplinary tactics. He also determined that my daughter was a good mother, but too passive about her husband’s approach to discipline, so CPS took the remaining five children and put them in a foster home together. Both my daughter and her husband were required to take classes to learn how to recognize the symptoms and patterns of disciplinary abuse.
Extended Family Steps Up
By the end of October, CPS started considering whether my daughter was able to provide a safe and nurturing environment for her children as a single parent. They scheduled a Zoom meeting with all the relatives and select friends to work out how much help and support she might need and who would be best suited to provide help and support.
After the meeting dispersed but before the allotted Zoom minutes has expired, my daughter and I chatted briefly about how I, specifically, could help. At one point she said, “I wish you were closer. You are my kids’ only living grandfather and I think they need a grandpa in their lives.”
God’s Plan for My Service to Him
I replied, “I wish I lived closer, too. In fact,…” and at this moment, an odd thought, that I believe sounded like the voice of God, popped into my head and out of my mouth. “…I’m going to let my lease expire and move up there at the end of May! And since I don’t have a car anymore, I think I’ll leave everything I own behind and walk up to Vermont. If I took it easy and turned it into an adventure, it might take one to two years. I’d collect human interest stories along the way. Maybe God wants me to encounter someone who has been searching for answers? And by not paying rent for a year or two, I could easily start over once I arrive!”
To my absolute surprise, my daughter heartily agreed! She thought it was a GOOD idea!
Provide for Healthy Living
About the same time in August, I talked with my doctor about how my diabetes seemed to have changed. I was using long-acting insulin (which is suspended in a solution that keeps it from being rapidly absorbed by cells, so the blood sugar disperses more evenly over time instead of spiking and dropping like a roller-coaster). I told him that by bedtime most nights my blood-sugar was way too high. It seemed to me that the long-term effects of the insulin were retaining too much sugar in the bloodstream. My doctor suggested that I try integrating a more rapid insulin into my daily routine. I asked him how much and when I should the rapid insulin. His answer to when was “just before eating.” But his answer to how much was “just guess. Start with 3 to 5 units and adjust as needed.”
Just Guess
Guessing is not my forte.
Studying Endocrinology
To make the best guesses I could, I dove into research to find out how endocrinologists figure out insulin needs. (It turns out that the best of them… just guess. But they do so based on standardized weight, age, sex, activity, and lifestyle measurements. Taking what I learned, I began to build an Excel spreadsheet to collect all the necessary data from baseline datum points to historical data movements, fed the results into endocrinology “best guess” formulas, and began tracking my own carb intake, exercise minutes and difficulty, insulin units, blood glucose at various and multiple times of the day, and so forth.
I wasn’t dieting. I was writing down everything I ate, but only to record how many carbs everything had. I needed to know how many carbs went in versus how much insulin went in to compensate, in order to get my personal Insulin Correction Ratio, or ICR, correct. However, because when you look up nutrition information on something edible, you get information on calories, portion sizes, measurement styles, macro nutrients, micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, aardvarks, zygotes, and the kitchen sink, I included the full range of data in addition to carbs. And, because weight figures into the dosing calculation for insulin, I began weighing myself every morning so that the calculations could work on data on one row, day by day.
Losing Weight
Although I wasn’t actively trying to lose weight, particularly by not paying much attention to the portion sizes I was eating, I surprised myself at how much insulin I needed to compensate for carbs. The easiest way to take in fewer carbs is to eat smaller portions. One can search for foods that are less carb dense to replace foods that are more carb dense, but necessary foods have the carbs that they have, and if you can’t substitute something else, then the only way to shrink the carb numbers is to eat less of that food. And so, weight began coming off.
That was a good thing, because on August 4, 2021, the day I started this insulin project, I weight 304.6 pounds. My father weighed between 150 and 170 pounds, so I was basically pumping enough blood in order to carry around the weight of two people.
Once I knew I would be walking 2000+ miles with a backpack across the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountain ranges, I started training myself to walk. At first, I could walk only a few thousand steps at a time, with a daily total distance of under a mile. As my strength and endurance increased, my weight began to drop faster. I still wasn’t dieting or trying to lose weight. It just started abandoning me, looking for a more friendly host.
Provide for Others
Have you ever abandoned everything you own?
Many have abandoned everyone, and many have never had anything, but only the most guttered, broken, addicted members of society have given up everything. Or so we assume, because if the truth were spoken aloud, we typically don’t really care, so we don’t really know.
For me, however, the Long Walk will make the third time I’ve just left everything I own behind. The first two times were low, desperate times in my life.
When my third wife and I were dating, talking about getting married, she went out of her way to let me know that my things just didn’t fit in with hers. They weren’t nice enough, expensive enough, meaningful enough for her and would not be welcome in our new life together. But hey, I was trading up, right? Ah, the innocence of naivety.
When the events I chronicled in Sparrow: Part 1 occurred, I gave everything to my other daughter. Over the years, some of it trickled back to me, mostly because I remembered something, ask if she still had it, and she sent it to me.
This time, I plan on giving everything I own to others, following Jesus’ instruction to the rich, young ruler: “Go, sell everything you have to give to the poor, and follow me.” The young man went away sad because he had much. I will be leaving Dalton, GA filled with joy for the poor will have my things.
What Do We Own, Anyway?
Ownership is funny thing, though. Birds build and “own” nests but occupy them only while they raise their chicks. A two-year-old understand ownership as “If you give it to me, it’s mine. If I’m holding it, it’s mine. If you have it but I want to play with it, it’s mine. If I see it, it’s mine. If I give it to you, it’s still mine!”
Adults are much the same as two-year-olds. If we grow it, we have the right to reap from it. If we reap an abundance of it, we have the right to preserve it. If we build it, or buy it, or find it legitimately, we have the right to keep it and use it. If we work hard for it, we want to keep it. (That includes the spoils of war, criminal activity, sexual abuse, and many other questionable means of obtaining it.)
The truth is: there is nothing that one must absolutely, unequivocally, in every society whether progressive or backward, in every era of history, in every situation, OWN.
Genuine Needs
Wait a minute! What about needs? What about rights? What about sustenance, shelter, provisions? Aren’t the things we need necessities by definition? And if we have our necessities, isn’t that ownership?
Well, in a purely semantics way, having our necessities at hand is possession, not ownership. Do you own that apple, that glass of water, that roomful of air? Not really. You eat that apple, drink that water, breathe that air, because if you display that apple, withhold that water from others, prevent others from breathing that air, you waste those things. Until eaten, drank, and inhaled, those things are not part of you, and you can own only that which is a part of you!
You own your thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, insights, personality, and soul. But the car, parked in front of the house, on the land? The car and the house will eventually become worthless, and the land will be there long after tens of thousands of future generations have passed away and been forgotten.
Provide Financially, Part 2
So, on June 1st, I will become a nomad. I will be homeless, but not helpless. I will be exposed, but not vulnerable. I will become freer and richer than before in so many non-materialistic ways. I will also not have a car payment, rent payment, credit payment, maintenance expenses, utilities. My primary travelling expenses will be replacing what wears out and resupplying provisions.
The Blessing of Gratitude
Thank you, God, for allowing my car to be totaled. I didn’t see it coming and if you had told me you were providing for me, I wouldn’t have understood what you meant. I thanked you before, not because I knew what I was grateful for, but because I trusted you then, and I trust you now. Certainly, you have even greater blessings to come and higher purposes for setting this path plainly before my feet.
When the time is right, I, the Lord, will make it happen.
The date for leaving gets ever closer. I’m packing and unpacking, arranging and rearranging the contents of my backpack. I’m experimenting with creative ways to include my phone, backup power source, laptop, blood glucose meter, ear buds, Fitbit watch, Garmin, charging elements for the phone, laptop, ear buds, watch, Garmin, reference guides, paper maps, compass, multi-tool knife, solar power charging panels, and…
…Hey! These are essentials if y’all plan to keep finding new blogs from me as I walk! Sheesh!
Schedule and Countdown to Leaving
- Get the backpack situation finalized
- Get my domain (iamsparrow.com) finalized – March 31, 2022
- Give the apartment management a 60-day notice of intent to vacate – April 1, 2022
- Pack up the things I’ll need for winter and store them with my sister, to be shipped to wherever I am when winter approaches.
- Give away everything else in the apartment
- Vacate the apartment and turn in the keys – May 31, 2022
- Start Walking – June 1, 2022